Welcoming the Nepalese Government to Have I Been Pwned

6 hours ago (troyhunt.com)

This is good news considering the current state of government run IT services in Nepal (that the page to schedule a passport renewal appointment requires you change your local timezone or override TZ to Asia/Kathmandu should tell you the state of some of these services).

In having to interact with Nepali government websites I've noticed things like endpoints not even doing basic input sanitization, letting your run arbitrary queries on biometric data. Asking around the tech industry on how to report this it seems like this is a common occurrence. Someone even found a vulnerability that was apparently purposefully unpatched to most likely aid in corruption.

First thought was: ouch, government data got leaked and added to the database.

Please make it possible to change email addresses, so I don't have to create a new account and verify all domains again. Thank you for the great free service.

I do like the idea behind Have I Been Pwned, and honestly if a government took it over that might be nice if we had some guarantees. It feels like something that ought to be a public service with super duper special oversight to avoid it being used by law enforcement(since sending any information is necessarily bad)

Is this the new government after the old one was violently overthrown last year?

  • Yes, this is the new government elected in March of this year after the old one was overthrown in September of last year.

  • You should at least attempt to ask an LLM for advice before asking a question that contributes nothing and only takes away value from a conversation like this.

    Personally I'd recommend Fable or Kimi K3. Have you tried them yet? They're better at your job than you could ever be, even in theory.

Seems like an almost irresponsibly misleading headline.

  • Are you reading it as if the Nepalese government had a data breach? Given the positive connotation of 'welcoming', I read it differently but I can see the confusion indeed

    • I also read the title as a sardonic welcome (negative connotation). I was surprised to find out it was just a tiny puff piece of self-promotion.

      Being “welcomed” to HIBP sounds a lot like being “welcomed” to the Bronx by a mugging.

      I admit I do not follow HIBP and was unaware of this kind of outreach they do.

  • Well Troy Hunt makes money off the back of your data being leaked so I expect nothing less.

    • I'm pretty certain that my data would be leaked regardless of him, so as far as objectionable businesses go, his is pretty low on my list of ones to be upset about

    • In some sense companies that don't protect your data make money off the back of your data being leaked (in the sense that they saved money by not spending it on security)

    • And police officers make a living off of crime; ambulance personnel wouldn't get paid if nobody got sick or injured. What's the point of that observation?

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