General Discussion and Whimsical Banter

Bridlington1

Continued from the Regular Savings Accounts: The Best Currently Available List thread:

flaneurs_lobster said:

It seems that the Internet's Wayback Machine (archive.org) has been hacked and subjected to a DDOS attack. Whether because of this or as a precaution it's offline.

Anyways, it does mean that @Bridlington1 's most useful list of Regular Saver t&cs is unavailable. 

I've had the dreaded email from haveibeenpwned as a result:

You've been pwned!

You signed up for notifications when your account was pwned in a data breach and unfortunately, it's happened. Here's what's known about the breach:

Email found:
Breach:	Internet Archive
Date of breach:	28 Sep 2024
Number of accounts:	31,081,179
Compromised data:	Email addresses, Passwords, Usernames
Description:	In September 2024, the digital library of internet sites Internet Archive suffered a data breach that exposed 31M records. The breach exposed user records including email addresses, screen names and bcrypt password hashes.

Further details:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-archive-hacked-data-breach-impacts-31-million-users/

Sadly this also means the archived list of switching offers also becomes unavailable for the time being.

In the interests of having a failsafe option in case such an event happens again I shall be downloading pdf versions of the Ts&Cs of each of the regular savers and switching offers once the wayback machine is up and running and storing these on a onedrive to reduce the likelihood of us losing access to them for an extended period in the future.

badger09

@Bridlington1
Sorry to hear this. 

Will you have to change all your passwords? That could be a nightmare in view of the number of accounts you operate. 

masonic

badger09 said:

@Bridlington1
Sorry to hear this. 

Will you have to change all your passwords? That could be a nightmare in view of the number of accounts you operate. 

It only means that accounts at Internet Archive have been compromised. Unless the same password was used elsewhere, it is contained to those credentials. The greater problem is that the site has been under DDoS attack, which has driven it offline, and it is still offline now. Who would do this to such an important free resource!

badger09

masonic said:

badger09 said:

@Bridlington1
Sorry to hear this. 

Will you have to change all your passwords? That could be a nightmare in view of the number of accounts you operate. 

It only means that accounts at Internet Archive have been compromised. Unless the same password was used elsewhere, it is contained to those credentials. The greater problem is that the site has been under DDoS attack, which has driven it offline, and it is still offline now. Who would do this to such an important free resource!

Fair comment. 

I only mentioned passwords but usernames & emails were also compromised. No idea how others manage, but I certainly use the same username for more than one account, and the same email for dozens. 

masonic

badger09 said:

masonic said:

badger09 said:

@Bridlington1
Sorry to hear this. 

Will you have to change all your passwords? That could be a nightmare in view of the number of accounts you operate. 

It only means that accounts at Internet Archive have been compromised. Unless the same password was used elsewhere, it is contained to those credentials. The greater problem is that the site has been under DDoS attack, which has driven it offline, and it is still offline now. Who would do this to such an important free resource!

Fair comment. 

I only mentioned passwords but usernames & emails were also compromised. No idea how others manage, but I certainly use the same username for more than one account, and the same email for dozens. 

Knowing an individual's username or email address should not compromise the security of a site using those details for authentication (everyone reading the forum knows the username I have chosen here). Quite often username = email address, and it is not intended that people keep their email address secret. That said, I do try to use randomised usernames and a different email address for sites where security is important (internet banking, email, etc). Though the main benefit of this is being able to instantly recognise an "important" email as fake if it is sent to the email address I have set up for things like social media.

PRAISETHESUN

Breaches like this really highlight the importance of good digital hygiene - making sure you don't reuse passwords and set up 2FA everywhere that supports.

An old email of mine was in a different breach fairly recently and I've noticed an uptick of spam and phishing attempts as a result, but as mentioned above only that specific password was affected. Apart from the DDOS preventing access to the website, it's usually a fairly trivial matter to change it after a breach anyway.

Bridlington1

masonic said:

badger09 said:

@Bridlington1
Sorry to hear this. 

Will you have to change all your passwords? That could be a nightmare in view of the number of accounts you operate. 

It only means that accounts at Internet Archive have been compromised. Unless the same password was used elsewhere, it is contained to those credentials. The greater problem is that the site has been under DDoS attack, which has driven it offline, and it is still offline now. Who would do this to such an important free resource!

And fortunately I never duplicate passwords and have MFA for my email account so at present my emails are unaffected by this, though I'm on red alert for spam emails.

As for who would do this to such an important free resource, without wanting to get into the realms of politics (especially given many, myself included, have pretty strong views on the issue) it seems it was a pro-Palestine group on this occasion, apparently they've been defacing some of the content, hopefully not from my lists.

I'm currently downloading regular saver Ts&Cs of those that I can. Using a spot of link guessing, often from the wayback machine links themselves I've been able to recover a fair few of the NLA ones given that many of them don't pull the old summary boxes and some (especially Leeds and Coventry so far) have made their summary box links easy to guess. I screenshotted the Ts&Cs for the NLA Monmouthshire BS 6% Exclusive RS a while back and posted it on this forum so this has been recovered.

I should be able to recover most of the regular saver Ts&Cs as things stand, if the wayback machine remains down I'll be in touch with the banks/building societies themselves to get hold of copies of the rest of the old summary boxes. 

I'll upload them all to a OneDrive at some point over the next day or so and post that link on the Archived List of Regular Savers Thread as well as a list of those I'm yet to recover.

flaneurs_lobster

Bridlington1 said:

I'll upload them all to a OneDrive at some point over the next day or so and post that link on the Archived List of Regular Savers Thread as well as a list of those I'm yet to recover.

Thanks @Bridlington1. Realised how useful that list is when I needed to check a detail of a RS that I can't find my copy of the T&C for. Only reference I could find online (that answered my query) was an article in the Daily Express!

gt94sss2

In a written ministerial statement, City Minister Tulip Siddiq announced a package of reforms to 'improve competition and competitiveness' in the UK banking sector.  

The move will allow banks to amass £35billion of customer deposits before needing to ring-fence retail banking operations from riskier investment banking operations.

US investment banking giants JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, which own the popular deposit-taking accounts Chase and Marcus in the UK, are set to benefit from the change - and it could result in them offering higher savings rates.  

Chase and Marcus are not ring-fenced from the investment banks' wider operations, so the £25billion limit was a barrier to their deposit-taking growth.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-13962165/Government-raise-bank-ring-fencing-threshold-35bn-boon-Chase-Marcus.html

pecunianonolet

gt94sss2 said:

In a written ministerial statement, City Minister Tulip Siddiq announced a package of reforms to 'improve competition and competitiveness' in the UK banking sector.  

The move will allow banks to amass £35billion of customer deposits before needing to ring-fence retail banking operations from riskier investment banking operations.

US investment banking giants JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, which own the popular deposit-taking accounts Chase and Marcus in the UK, are set to benefit from the change - and it could result in them offering higher savings rates.  

Chase and Marcus are not ring-fenced from the investment banks' wider operations, so the £25billion limit was a barrier to their deposit-taking growth.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-13962165/Government-raise-bank-ring-fencing-threshold-35bn-boon-Chase-Marcus.html

Preparations for the next crash - The Debt Crisis