When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number(mango.pdf.zone)

2326 points by michael_fine 5 years ago | 340 comments

kccqzy 5 years ago |

Nice. Here's a similar personal story with a PSA that sometimes blurring is NOT sufficient.

A friend of mine posted on Instagram a picture of a U.S. visa (or something similar; it was probably five years ago) to announce her trip to the U.S., and she took care to blur out sensitive information such as her passport number. But a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse and I successfully unblurred it and told her my discovery. I didn't use any specialized software; it was just Mathematica with its built-in ImageDeconvolve function with guessed parameters for the Gaussian kernel.

I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring, and if it is a PDF, convert to an image afterwards because too many PDF editors use non-destructive operations to add a new object instead of changing what's underneath.

function_seven 5 years ago | |

Your advice is good, and I agree that you didn't use specialized software to reverse the blur, but this

> I didn't use any specialized software; it was just Mathematica with its built-in ImageDeconvolve function with guessed parameters for the Gaussian kernel.

is one of the most HN comments I've come across recently :)

zwayhowder 5 years ago | | |

Reminds me of the Simpson's 3D episode. Professor Frink's

>"Well, it should be obvious to even the most dimwitted individual, who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology..."

1f60c 5 years ago | | |

That reminds me of this legendary comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

mroche 5 years ago | | |

> is one of the most HN comments I've come across recently :)

That gave me a laugh. I don't have any experience with Mathematica, but everytime I see it mentioned (usually on HN) I'm amazed at the sheer breadth the system is capable of. The amount of use cases and possibilities blows my mind.

astrec 5 years ago | | |

Whatever knocks this exchange off the top spot will be really special: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

gus_massa 5 years ago | | |

If it is in the installable version now, it will be in Wolfram Alpha in 5 years if you can guess the right command, and in 10 year Wolfram Alpha will just automatically select the blurred part and make a fake unblurred versions of the jpg.

batsigner 5 years ago | | |

Yet another example of someone mistaking the quality of a single person for the quality of a platform

lysp 5 years ago | |

> I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring, and if it is a PDF, convert to an image afterwards because too many PDF editors use non-destructive operations to add a new object instead of changing what's underneath.

We had a similar issue in Australia as well.

Politicians phone bills are published on the government website in summary form.

Someone in 2017 decided to blank out their phone numbers by changing the phone number text colour to white (same as background).

End result - hundreds of politicians and former prime ministers had their phone numbers leaked.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-20/phone-numbers-of-fede...

mickotron 5 years ago | | |

I used to work in IT for a state based police force in Australia. Traffic reports can be requested by those involved in traffic accidents, which includes parties to the accident and their details.

People used to be able to get the personal information of police officers if they were involved, intentionally or not, in a traffic accident with a police car. They would request for the traffic accident report, and that included the personal information (including home address) of the police officers in the car. I was in QA and I tested the change when it was fixed. It now includes the address of Police HQ when a police officer is involved in a traffic incident.

dheera 5 years ago | |

Yup. I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago in 2007, and it was republished in Gizmodo in 2014: https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-never-use-pixelation-to-h...

You can dictionary attack pixelated photos.

With Gaussian kernels, besides deconvolution you can sometimes also dictionary attack them if you have the original font and if the kernel is properly normalized kernel (i.e. most gaussian blurs).

Although I haven't tried, I think there may even be neural network based techniques that can perform even more effectively than a dictionary attack.

Separately, if the image editing tools added sufficient random noise to their mosaic filters they might be able to thwart most of these attacks, or at least make them significantly harder.

jacquesm 5 years ago | | |

Interesting, thank you for the link. I had a hunch this should be possible but I wasn't aware that it was already proven. I used a similar trick on image recognition: turn images into a single 32 bit word by heavy pixelation and then look up a matching description. It's interesting how often that will work once you feed it with enough data. After all, that gives you 4 billion inputs mapped onto 4 billion descriptions, and plenty of those will contain the Eiffel tower with various cloudy backgrounds apparently recognized perfectly.

It's a total cheat but it is funny how close that can get you to something that might be actually useful.

dylan604 5 years ago | |

I once had to provide my employer copies of court documents proving something or other in order to qualify for the benefits plan I was attempting to enroll. The part of the document that contained the info they required also contained other information I did not want them to have, and I was more than irked at having to do this in the first place. I used Photoshop to draw a 99% black box as the redaction, but then using a 100% black font color typed in a nasty little message. Nobody was ever going to see it, but just knowing that if they did it would be a shock. I qualified for the package.

Namidairo 5 years ago | |

> and if it is a PDF, convert to an image afterwards because too many PDF editors use non-destructive operations to add a new object instead of changing what's underneath.

You'd be surprised at how many times this happens on Government documents with redaction.

Someone1234 5 years ago | | |

That's why some even departments now have policies of printing and re-scanning retracted documents. It is dumb, but yet pretty hard to get wrong.

Both MS Word and PDF have leaked redacted/removed information in the past. Wasting paper given the severity of some of these leaks is minimal cost.

banana_giraffe 5 years ago | | |

Even when the black box is done right, sometimes there are quasi side-channel leaks of the size. The box covering a name for instances may be discoverable if there are only a few names possible, and it's a small box, meaning it's the shortest name.

Agentlien 5 years ago | | |

A friend of mine once had to review some (Swedish) court document with redacted witness names. It was a word document with history intact. Just undoing a few steps was all it took.

nikanj 5 years ago | |

My all-time favourite recommendation is "print, cut out the sensitive parts with an exacto knife, rescan".

Firstly because it's a nice mix of analog and digital, and secondly because it's short enough to fit in a tweet - yet extremely secure.

michaelt 5 years ago | | |

"Information to be withheld should be black highlighted using a tool such as the word highlighter tool like this ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ and then printed off. This print out should then be scanned in and saved as a PDF."

Ministry of Defence redaction policy, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

cgriswald 5 years ago | | |

...shred cut out parts, burn remains, mix with water, encase in cement, explode, divide rubble into four parts, disperse one part each in Lake Superior, Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and the Great Salt Lake; assume an alias, move to Alaska...

ponker 5 years ago | | |

This is how military redactions have been done forever. If a soldier writes home to his family and includes classified details (“I watched the sun rise over Mt Vesuvius yesterday but today we are moving west”) the censors just cut out the text with a knife.

bentcorner 5 years ago | |

> I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring

I've seen people use image editors on mobile and they'll "scribble" out sensitive information, but one of the problems is that if you pick the wrong pen it'll blend your strokes so it's not 100% opacity (but on a casual glance it's close enough). You can zoom in and change the contrast of a photo that has been redacted this way and recover information.

saagarjha 5 years ago | | |

It's unfortunate because that's the "thicker" brush so people tend to choose it first…

TwoBit 5 years ago | |

A pedophile ringleader was once caught by reversing a graphical swirl he used to try to hide his face in a picture.

DanBC 5 years ago | | |

Yes. Wikipedia has an article about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil

undebuggable 5 years ago | |

> I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring

Real life document workflows can be really tricky. What if one is required to print or photocopy the obscured document? Devastating for printer's toner or cartridge lifetime... In some cases opaque grayish rectangle does the job.

userbinator 5 years ago | | |

White (with a black border) is fine too. Black is popular, but the goal is to make it an image with no residual data.

pessimizer 5 years ago | | |

> Devastating for printer's toner or cartridge lifetime

Which could result in thousands of dollars of loss over decades. Is that really a significant concern? Charge the client for it.

bayindirh 5 years ago | | |

I generally edit the sensitive part out and match it to the background of the document looks much cleaner IMHO.

However, I agree that it requires some quick hand in image manipulation software.

j_walter 5 years ago | |

I found many years ago that my pay statements suffered from the last item you mentioned. My personal info had a black box over things like the SSN...but if I just moved the window around the black box followed slower than the document so everything was visible. ADP never acknowledged the problem when I brought it to their attention, but they did eventually fix it.

ErikAugust 5 years ago | |

Sure. I would go a step further - just don’t post any photos of these sorts of documents ever. The risk and reward ratio is too skewed.

irrational 5 years ago | | |

That is my argument against using any social media in a nutshell - the risk and reward ratio is too skewed.

bjornorn 5 years ago | |

Did the blog author actually un-blur the booking reference though? He states he tried to un-blur the barcode, was unsuccessful and then realized the booking reference was right there in the picture. Nothing about un-blurring it.

howlgarnish 5 years ago | | |

The original image was not blurred, he simply read off the plaintext booking reference. (After first trying and failing to scan the also unblurred bar code.)

thrwyoilarticle 5 years ago | |

>a Gaussian blur is easy to reverse

That's the most surprising thing I've read today. I assumed it was destructive.

jacquesm 5 years ago | | |

It's lossy, but not destructive, and a 'sharpen' operation is technically the same as blur but in reverse. So you won't end up pixel-perfect after doing an 'unblur' but you will be able to make out more than you could before.

Sysosmaster 5 years ago | |

The thing to remember here is that the only way to hide (real world) data in an image is to reduce the amount of data in the picture... a blur or swirl leaves most if not all data just in the picture (although distorted) Any filter that removes data (such as pixelate or blacking out / whiting out) can be used to safely hide this data... Just remember to also strip out any unwanted meta data (Exif-data) and do not use layers but a 'flattened' version of the picture.

kortex 5 years ago | | |

Pixelation is also attackable. Generate input (e.g. GAN) and apply pixelation until it converges. Probably won't be super accurate but enough to probably ID someone.

Black/delete (and flatten/rebroadcast) is the only way.

plorg 5 years ago | |

"I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring, and if it is a PDF, convert to an image afterwards because too many PDF editors use non-destructive operations to add a new object instead of changing what's underneath."

I have this at work, with engineering drawings. With mobile equipment often were not dealing with engineering companies per se, and they won't or don't know how to get us CAD models of their equipment. And we often don't have the equipment on have at the time we need to make drawings.

But if you have a PDF with vector drawings, often a manual, and one or two good dimensions you can make a reasonably accurate model. AutoCAD even makes this easy with the PDFIMPORT function.

More often than I would expect, there's a whole other drawing view either covered by a white box or off-page. Once it looked like it had been drawn over with a white paintbrush tool, and if course the path of that too was also visible.

stjohnswarts 5 years ago | |

Why not use a randomized blur so people who like to do such things can waste time trying to figure it out when it's actually nothing but random numbers and has none of the original info?

sjs382 5 years ago | |

Sometimes a black bar or even cropping isn't sufficient. You still have to trust the editing software.

There was a scandal around 2003 when a TV host took a topless photo, cropped it and shared the cropped photo online. Unfortunately, the software (Photoshop—I think CS3) she used to crop the photo stored the original photo as metadata if you didn't change the original filename. The original (uncropped) photo could be seen in the "Open File" preview dialog when opening the cropped version.

qwertox 5 years ago | |

Blacking out is the correct thing to do.

Not cutting it so that it becomes transparent since this may still preserve the color component of the RGBA-pixels, even if it is invisible and blended with a black background.

greenmana 5 years ago | |

If using for example Word you can conveniently just change the background text color to black. /s

POiNTx 5 years ago |

Apart from the really interesting content, this is an extremely good read, strikes me as the right kind of balance of information and keeping you entertained. I really enjoyed this writing style!

sorum 5 years ago |

Some Grade A zingers in there:

> The man in question is Tony Abbott, one of Australia’s many former Prime Ministers.

> For security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites.

> Harold Holt was another former Prime Minster and we… lost him? He disappeared while going for a swim one morning. This is not a joke. We named Harold Holt Memorial Swim Centre after him. I repeat, this is not a joke.

danieltrembath 5 years ago | |

"...I called up and was all like “yeah bloody g’day, day for it ay, hot enough for ya?”. Once the formalities were out of the way..."

ralphael 5 years ago | | |

I couldn't stop laughing.

His skills at hacking are only matched by his wit at writing.

fergie 5 years ago | |

"(Instagram, in case you don’t know it, is an app you can open up on your phone any time to look at ads)."

Dragonai 5 years ago | | |

This was the line that made me audibly laugh. Couldn't not finish the article after that. Great read.

fphhotchips 5 years ago |

I feel like this buries the lede massively: Qantas' system was run by Amadeus, who also run the booking system for some 200 other airlines [0]. If you could do this with Qantas and get all those notes, you could probably do it to any other airline and get them too. That would be bad enough, but it also appears that this issue (or one very much like it) has been reported widely at least back in early 2019.

So, either Amadeus didn't fix the issue until it was disclosed here (very very bad) or Qantas didn't update their booking system for a security patch (also very bad).

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/15/amadeus-airline-booking-vu...

tomerico 5 years ago |

I found his advice to Tony on how to get better with computers remarkably insightful:

> I said there probably was a book out there about “the basics of IT”, but it wouldn’t help much. I didn’t learn from a book. 13 year old TikTok influencers don’t learn from a book. They just vibe.

> My mum always said when I was growing up that:

> There were “too many buttons” She was afraid to press the buttons, because she didn’t know what they did I can understand that, since grown ups don’t have the sheer dumb hubris of a child, and that’s what makes them afraid of the buttons.

> Like, when a toddler uses a spoon for the first time, they don’t know what a spoon is, where they are, or who the current Prime Minister is. But they see the spoon, and they see the cereal, and their dumb baby brain is just like “yeA” and they have a red hot go. And like, they get it wrong the first few times, but it doesn’t matter, because they don’t know to be afraid of getting it wrong. So eventually, they get it right.

> Okay so I didn’t tell the spoon thing to Tony Abbott, but I did tell him what I always told my mum, which was: “Mum you just gotta press all the buttons, to find out what they do”.

abixb 5 years ago |

Great post, thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

BTW, on a side note, when you try and visit the blog's homepage[0] and scroll down to the bottom, you find a link to an actual (password protected) PDF file called Mango.pdf[1]. The author 'Alex' says the password for the PDF has been embedded in the page and it didn't take me a lot of time to figure the password out from the HTML source[2].

But when I opened the PDF, I was hit with this random string of characters:

cGJhdGVuZ2h5bmd2YmFmLCBsYmggZmJ5aXJxIHpsIHlodnR2IGNobW15ci4gQCB6ci BiYSBnanZnZ3JlIGp2Z3UgbGJoZSBzbmliaGV2Z3IgcXJmZnJlZyBnYiB0cmcgbGJo ZSBlcmpuZXEuIFZnJ2YgeXZ4ciwgYWJnIG4gaXJlbCB0YmJxIGVyam5lcSBmYiBodQ o=

I tried to decode this using every available decoder, but it only throws up random result. Was wondering if any of you smart people here had any idea about this code.

[0] https://mango.pdf.zone/

[1] https://mango.pdf.zone/mango.pdf

[2] view-source:https://mango.pdf.zone/

EDIT: SOLVED IT!

As the commenters who replied to me mentioned, this puzzle is double-encoded. I think the trick is to figure out which decoder to use first.

ibudiallo 5 years ago |

The power of Inspect Element. This is exactly how I found out I was underpaid[1]. A company I worked for used a software called erecruit to manage my contracts. When you click on a clients name, it makes an ajax request to fetch the data. Being a web developer, I inspected the data returned.

I'm pretty sure all the developer did was:

    echo json_encode($queryResult);

I saw how much I was getting paid vs how much they were charging clients. I quickly changed my prices after that.

[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/how-much-do-you-charge-for-your-wor...

dylan604 5 years ago | |

I think this is a lesson lots of early AJAX/client-side coders should be forced to learn. When you do a `SELECT * FROM` and return the entire result, that data is visible on the client end in full detail (if you're familiar with how to use the browser's dev tools that is). Maybe you only make some of that data visible to the user in the UI, but the data you didn't use is still part of that AJAX return. Only send to the browser the data you actually need!

bagacrap 5 years ago | |

Every consulting firm pays their employees way less than the hourly rate they bill clients. That's how the firm exists. Good for you that you were in a situation to dictate your compensation.

vishnugupta 5 years ago |

I accidentally discovered a way to get hold of passport details of random people by applying for Visa on arrival to Vietnam. There are these online portals which do some document pre processing which is legit. And on landing in Vietnam we are expected to show that we have already applied for Visa. It so happens that these portals do batch processing. Which means my application is processed along with a half a dozen or so other random applicants.

And so I applied for one. And when I received the confirmation document I received the entire batch file. It included passport number, expiry date and other PII of ten random people which would be super valuable in the hands of criminals and such.

And conversely ten random people know my PII

hdi8534 5 years ago | |

The same when you apply to give up vietnamese citizenship, all your info are public on the goverment website (pdf files with name, birthday, current addresss...)

rntksi 5 years ago | | |

with the way how the government over there works, even if you have those information... there's really nothing much to do with it.

jwong_ 5 years ago | |

Foreign visitors to China staying in non-hotels are required to register at the local police station. The police in the city I visit use their personal cellphones to take pictures of your passport, use their personal WeChat accounts to send them who-knows-where, and then store them in paper form on the top of their desks. Anyone who walks in to register can see what kinds of foreigners are staying, where they're staying, their jobs, passport numbers, etc.

city41 5 years ago | |

I recently bought a used phone on ebay. When I turned it on it had the previous owner's data in tact and no passcode. I opened Gmail and was in their account.

I immediately factory reset the phone. My point being sensitive data leaks all over the place in many ways in today's world.

tschwimmer 5 years ago |

This is one the of the funniest things I've read in recent memory. He made an Instagram post 30 second check of Chrome's dev tools into a narrative I couldn't stop reading. Thanks for brightening my day author!

zamfi 5 years ago |

I am very impressed by this piece. Something about how “Alex” manages to blend the kind of humor not typically associated with compassion or competence, with a story that is most spectacular because of the very compassionate and competent actions of its protagonist...I literally couldn’t stop reading.

So well done.

aahortwwy 5 years ago |

> “You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah!”

I mean not to call him out but this did happen and he didn't navigate his way out (although that says nothing about his confidence).

https://www.smh.com.au/national/tony-abbott-lost-in-the-outb...

EDIT: To be fair, it's been a decade. Maybe he's worked on his orienteering skills since having that experience?

sellyme 5 years ago |

The contact form on Abbott's website 403ing is impressively on-brand.

coagmano 5 years ago | |

I wouldn't be surprised if the staff deliberately sabotaged it. I've worked for a party before and the emails are horrendous

iso947 5 years ago | | |

My MP had several death threats last year - including in the post to her home address inside an otherwise normal looking birthday card.

Polylactic_acid 5 years ago | | |

There are so many website that will automate spamming every politician contact form with prewritten content about an issue so I'm surprised if those contact forms route anywhere other than /dev/null.

p49k 5 years ago |

I would encourage anyone interested in this article to read it thoroughly to the end. This is one of the most satisfying articles I’ve read recently and I really enjoy the author’s unique sense of humor.

rocqua 5 years ago | |

Try some of james mickens articles: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

They are written in a similar style, I really love them.

oefnak 5 years ago | | |

Thank you for this. I ate the entire mango.pdf and was still hungry.

lpa22 5 years ago | |

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this as well. It’s very rare I read blog posts of this length to the end but I was hooked

btilly 5 years ago |

The following line confuses me, because it contradicts a lot in the post.

Update: I have been arrested.

Is that just an obvious mistake? Or is there a news flash that we would like to hear more on?

akent 5 years ago | |

Looks like that was yet another joke.

vincnetas 5 years ago | |

Yes, if you read previous sentence, it ends abruptly

  "I mean you’re reading the blog post right now so obviousl"

philliphaydon 5 years ago |

I still find it strange you can manage a booking with just a reference and name. About ~5 years ago someone I follow on twitter posted their boarding pass and I replied to them with a screen shot asking if I should cancel the booking. They removed their post and I removed mine. But all it took was the reference on the boarding pass and their last name...

Cthulhu_ 5 years ago | |

What I've gathered left and right wrt the airline industry is that it was one of the earliest industries that went digital, and / but they have a lot of legacy going on.

I mean in this particular case, they could have Abbott create an account on their website first, but then, someone else booked the ticket for him so that makes things more complicated (because they don't have an e-mail address), and then there's tickets being booked all over the world, and then loads of people don't have computers or e-mail.

It escalates quickly.

howlgarnish 5 years ago | | |

The amount of pain still caused by things like somebody back in the sixties deciding that two characters is plenty to encode every single airline ever is still felt to this day. Witness the majesty of the "controlled duplicate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_codes

astura 5 years ago | |

I understand why... A lot of business travelers have a third party book their flights, so there isn't always a username/password. Airlines and travel agencies don't make it clear that it's sensitive information though.

The_Amp_Walrus 5 years ago |

The hacker known as "Alex" also gave a really fun talk at PyCon AU in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlNkIFipKZ4

adamjb 5 years ago | |

Associated blog post https://mango.pdf.zone/operation-luigi-how-i-hacked-my-frien...

and salty hacker news comments (his words) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14919845

mproud 5 years ago | |

Given how fun this post was to read, I can only imagine he is equally as funny in person!

dayjobpork 5 years ago |

It's nice to live in a country where not only do various parts of the government actively try to help someone with a really bizarre issue, but no one got arrested (or shot) for bullshit trumped-up hacking charges. I can't think of many other countries responding well to 'hi I'm some random person and I used the PM's boarding pass and found out all this secret stuff'

chrismorgan 5 years ago |

A few years back when I was looking to buy a house, I was interested in how long the property had been on the market. (I was looking in country towns and their outskirts, where six months is a typical time for a property to be on the market; I even saw one or two blocks of land that seemed to have been for sale for at least five or six years.) Few real estate agents tell you this on their websites (though if you ask, they may), and aggregators like domain.com.au and realestate.com.au don’t either. Except sometimes they do, in the markup. My vague recollection (I don’t have the scraping scripts I wrote handy right now, they’re just on my old laptop and backups) is that I found a JSON blob in the realestate.com.au mobile website containing two dates, and that the domain.com.au desktop website fetched a JSON response from an API which happened to contain one date. I ended up deciding that REA’s dates were when the listing was first seen and last updated, and the Domain one was one of those. Neither of these sites were actually displaying this date, but the data was there for me to take and feed into my research.

Careless or unwitting information disclosure from APIs—sometimes sensitive, sometimes not—is a real problem.

strange_aeons 5 years ago | |

That's interesting. The time on market is always listed on Danish real estate websites. And the aggregator sites also have previous listings.

logifail 5 years ago |

In some countries, identity documents are in relatively frequent use. The number of authorised strangers who would have access to one's identity document might be significantly higher in these jurisdictions than, say, the number who would be able to view Tony Abbott's passport number. I'm thinking of - for instance - the 'personnummer' in Sweden (I've heard friends recite theirs in public when asked for them).

Q: Should (merely) the number from your passport really be considered a secret?

toyg 5 years ago | |

In theory no, but in practice yes. It's the same for a lot of metadata about our lives that routinely doubles up as authentication factor, e.g. "to verify your identity, can you please confirm the first line of your address and your postcode?"... Most of my neighbours know that!

extraduder_ire 5 years ago | | |

As an example of metadata revealing a lot about you:

Ireland got a postcode system in 2015 (the last time they considered implementing postcodes to improve autosorting, they were so late to the party that "an post" (Irish postal service) had OCR machines good enough to just read the whole address) which assigns each residence in the country a 7-digit alphanumerical code. Called an "Eircode" [1] It is purported to be a solution to packages getting lost or delayed, and an unambiguous way of giving someone a building's address.

An Eircode can be resolved into a full postal address, and GPS co-ordinates for the address.

e.g, here's some Eircodes;

Facebook's headquarters: D02 Y098

President's house: D08 E1W3

Data protection commission: D02 RD28

To get the info for any of these, check out: https://finder.eircode.ie/

Personal note: I'm not too jazzed on the specifics of the implementation, but it sure is handy when you're shitfaced and can trivially explain exactly where you live to a food-delivery driver over the phone.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...

pretendgeneer 5 years ago |

Great read.

I really like the bit about learn "the IT", there's no book or anything to be good at computers you just gotta fuck around and find out a bunch.

Cthulhu_ 5 years ago | |

The problem is that there are a LOT of books, but what is relevant just changes every couple years.

I mean the IT books section of the charity shops is a good example of this, there's so many there for older versions of Office, operating systems, etc.

That said, I had a school book (Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum) that explains a lot of the basics of computers. Sure, it's about the Pentium architecture and early JVM and doesn't cover multi-core architecture or using GPU's to crunch numbers, but it goes through a lot of the basics.

AFlyingBoom 5 years ago |

I find it incredible that Abbott being openly vulnerable about his lack of competency with computers, has been more effective in making me like him than anything he has ever done in his political career.

Teams of media advisors and a very favorable alliance with the Murdock press have paled in comparison to this one blog post that didn't even have that as an aim.

sygma 5 years ago |

Great talk [0] given during the 2016 congress touching on the Amadeus flight booking system and the danger of posting your boarding pass on social media

[0]: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...

aneutron 5 years ago | |

This was an amazing watch. Thank you very much for the link.

rvz 5 years ago |

We blame these social networks for collecting vast amounts of our private data (yes we should), yet these folk have no problem of posting already sensitive information under a hashtag - creating an Aladdin's cave of identities waiting to be stolen for fraud as this blog-post has demonstrated.

'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place' - Eric Schmidt

I guess they will learn the hard way given that they aren't really 'tech savvy' or internet wise these days.

Polylactic_acid 5 years ago | |

The problem is people have no idea what is sensitive. Until just now I would have thought a boarding pass was safe to share.

Its more the airlines fault for making this info so easy to access with what looks like unsensitive info.

bjoli 5 years ago | | |

I have told people at airports to not friggin post their boarding passes or documents containing their booking refeeence on Instagram. Back when I was 20 I didn't lot of stupid things. One was to change tine obnoxious details about their reservations. When they were in air (and presumably had their phones off) I sent them a text message. "Never put booking information on asocial media".

I could probably have gotten in a lot of trouble.

ClumsyPilot 5 years ago | |

Boarding pass clearly should not allow tgis lwvel of access to yiur personal infornatiob- it has one job, boarding a plane.

cobookman 5 years ago | | |

It's also used in the customs process.

seesawtron 5 years ago |

>> Instagram, in case you don’t know it, is an app you can open up on your phone any time to look at ads).

Nailed it.

mrg2k8 5 years ago |

Imagine doing something similar to a government application of an EU country and in 15 minutes finding a way to expose all citizen requests for an EORI number ever (some tens of thousands), with all personal details there for you to take. This was last year and in the meantime they updated their application from an ancient 2003 Oracle one to one that's more modern.

Thinking in perspective now, I regret not going out with it because that ancient application probably cost millions of euro from taxes.

orisho 5 years ago |

This post was very amusing! It always bordered on silly meme-style writing, but never doing too much of it at once which I find annoying. The story itself was also very interesting!

0xy 5 years ago |

Surprisingly good experience, and even a call from the man himself. I'm actually impressed, I expected way more incompetence and fumbling from a government.

fahrradflucht 5 years ago |

Great read. If somebody is interest in another great talk about boarding pass data security, there is this one from 33c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...

Nextgrid 5 years ago |

I don’t know if it’s just me or it’s the fact that I’m reading this on mobile on a small screen but I couldn’t stand the writing style. Curious to know if anyone else felt that way.

h0l0cube 5 years ago | |

The writing style was irreverent, colloquial, and replete with cultural references, but also dense with information. I felt a constant tension of wanting to skim-read and actually parsing the content, but found it really entertaining all the while.

CosmicShadow 5 years ago | |

I loved it, it helped me keep reading the whole way through an extremely long, yet engaging article. Different people like different writing styles and humour obviously.

mindfulhack 5 years ago | |

Yeah I thought the person to be quite young. But I understood, as I've been that young and written in almost exactly that writing style before. :) I skimmed through it feeling fondness for my youth.

fireattack 5 years ago | |

I hate it. But I knew I'm never a fan of this kind of overly joking style (the same reason I can't stand famous YouTube Channel "half as interesting", despite I love his main channel.)

steveklabnik 5 years ago | |

I read it on my phone and I love the writing style.

Different people are different.

codetrotter 5 years ago | |

I think it was funny and I liked it. Still didn’t read the whole thing though – maybe later, am not in shape right now. But did read quite a bit of it.

gonzo41 5 years ago | |

It reads like a travel diary. Which I really like because you get the things that are done and the thoughts and feelings along the way.

stordoff 5 years ago | |

I found myself rolling my eyes a few times, but the core content was good so I didn't find it all that off-putting.

"Update: I have been arrested." did leave me slightly confused for a while though, probably due to the verbosity making me want to scan read.

mulmen 5 years ago | | |

If you were scanning that would be an easy joke to miss. The giveaway is the previous paragraph ending mid-word like the authorities just busted in and hauled the author off to a CIA black site.

C19is20 5 years ago | |

Humour, with a 'u'.

ezluckyfree 5 years ago | |

I agree, kind of. I had to skim it, some of the jokes were funny, it just took up too much space.

Camas 5 years ago | |

Feels like I accidentally opened discord

traverseda 5 years ago | |

Yeah, it was a bit yikes.

kayson 5 years ago | |

I couldn't either. It was absolutely terrible. I think you can achieve the style and voice he was going for without being completely over the top, which he very much was.

starpilot 5 years ago | |

Same. Sounds like the author thinks he's way funnier than he is.

mulmen 5 years ago | | |

I laughed out loud multiple times reading this and sent it to some friends whose senses of humor I respect and the consensus is this is funny.

netsharc 5 years ago | |

Couldn't stand it either, since I (probably like most of us here) know about the "scan the 2d barcode to get the booking number, use that and passenger last name to see their flight details" trick. The kid draws out that first bit for too long. Although he did get clever and used the developer tools (again here he goes into boring details) to find the actual passport number as some hidden JSON, and some other internal airline info...

mulmen 5 years ago |

This was a great read but I'm a bit disappointed there are no easter eggs in the page source. Or maybe I'm just not finding them.

hayyyyydos 5 years ago | |

There is one, but it's on the homepage - take a look under the "about" heading at the bottom and go from there.... (assuming that's the puzzle that ASD figured out)

iamshs 5 years ago |

I loved the writing style. That "hard mode" effect had me wheezing though.

gouggoug 5 years ago |

Out of curiosity a few months back I spent a few hours looking at this exact hashtag (#boardingpass) and other travel related hashtags.

I ended up thinking that Instagram was actively removing pictures of boarding passes because I could only find a surprisingly low amount of pictures containing valid Lastname/BookingRef. As for the few pictures available, the references were often either too old, or partially covered.

I'm still wondering if Instagram does remove such photos.

spyke112 5 years ago | |

I even get a 501 Not Implemented for https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/boardingpass/ on desktop. May be related?

mikeappell 5 years ago |

> If you laid all the people I contacted end to end along the equator, they would die, and you would be arrested.

Possibly the best line in an article full of really fantastic lines.

gregjw 5 years ago |

Most entertaining post-morterm I've ever read, Australian through and through.

thomasfromcdnjs 5 years ago |

aha amazing read, quality content.

Zealotux 5 years ago |

>I personally recommend blacking out (add a black rectangle) instead of blurring

This can be reversed as well, if you do black things out this way: please make sure you're using 100% opacity black. I've managed to retrieve data from plenty "blacked-out" documents simply by playing with contrast and exposure filters in Photoshop because the opacity wasn't set correctly.

cricalix 5 years ago | |

Black it out, print it to paper, scan it back in, embed the image in a Word document, and print to PDF. Wait, that's just how "most" people do it anyway..

kabacha 5 years ago |

Real question here is: should the passport number have any expectations of privacy? It seems like such an easy thing to expose as you literally put it down on every document like hotel check ins etc. AFAIK it's not even a random number and instead it's generated from basic info like birth year/place/gender.

That being said it was a really good blog!

rswail 5 years ago | |

It depends where you are from. Our (Australian) passports have a "series" letter at the start and then a set of numbers. Not sure whether they are random or incremental or derived.

YMMV based on nation that issues yours.

beatrobot 5 years ago |

I like that there was such a good response to the disclosure from all the different parties, compared to this: https://research.digitalinterruption.com/2020/09/10/giggle-l...

starpilot 5 years ago |

The tl;dr:

> Your boarding pass for a flight can sometimes be used to get your passport number. Don’t post your boarding pass or baggage receipt online, keep it as secret as your passport.

> How it works: The Booking Reference on the boarding pass can be used to log in to the airline’s “Manage Booking” page, which sometimes contains the passport number, depending on the airline. I saw that Tony Abbott had posted a photo of his boarding pass on Instagram, and used it to get his passport details, phone number, and internal messages between Qantas flight staff about his flight booking.

XCSme 5 years ago |

Amazingly written post, really enjoyable to read!

It's amazing that we have all those security protocols (HTTPS, e2e encryption, secure log-in, etc.) but in the end most of the "hacks" are just people being stupid or manipulated through social engineering.

maxden 5 years ago |

This got picked up by the news in Australia [0], they also interviewed the author [1].

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-19/tony-abbott-boarding-...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/radio/melbourne/programs/drive/alex-h...

thdrdt 5 years ago |

Lately I am thinking about building a framework for web APIs where the database stores the owner, group and other's rights for each entity. The framework will then fetch data based on the user and fills the models based on the rights set for each field.

Exactly for the reason shown in the article.

I believe right now it is still too difficult to do this in any framework. That's why developers take shortcuts and just expose all entity data or just make a mistake and forget about it.

Does anyone know if such a framework already exists? So per field rights, not per entity rights.

mulmen 5 years ago | |

Take a look at Postgres roles, I think they are similar to what you describe. This should allow you to set row level permissions per user. Not sure how well that scales.

I know postgrest uses it.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/user-manag.html

efreak 5 years ago | |

I think the Windows registry has this, doesn't it? Not really applicable to this use case, and do far as I know it's world-readable (acls are applied for writing, not reading) but it does have per-key ACLs (not sure about per-field).

throwawaynothx 5 years ago | |

or... GraphQL.

thdrdt 5 years ago | | |

How does GraphQL fix the problem of showing different fields depending on rights?

iandanforth 5 years ago |

This is a long read, but trust me, keep reading it's great.

jasomill 5 years ago |

Reminds me of the time I learned Jim Morrison's social security number from a framed form hanging on the wall next to my table at a Hard Rock Café, written in ballpoint pen, "redacted" with a magic marker that did nothing, obviously, to obfuscate the impression made by the pen in the paper.

While I have no idea how the SSN of a long-dead rock star could ever be useful, I'm certain I still have a copy saved around here somewhere...

WrtCdEvrydy 5 years ago |

For anyone who wants to do this easier... ZAP Proxy has a HUD display that will allow you to see the data flying on a page after you load it.

No need to do funky Inspect Element magic. Works wonders for reverse engineering how your fancy UI talks to the fancy API to do the fancy things.

If you can't figure out ZAP with HUD, you can alternatively use the Network tab on Chrome and switch to AJAX (if it's something that happens without the page loading)

bigiain 5 years ago | |

> funky Inspect Element magic

Are you sure you're on the right website?

xyzal 5 years ago |

Is it just me, or did anyone else try to clean up their monitor from dust, realizing eventually the "dust" is the websites background image?

WebDanube 5 years ago | |

TFW your monitor is dirty enough for you to not notice the dusty BG image.

efreak 5 years ago | | |

Could be worse. I'm pretty sure some of the dirt on one of my monitors is actually dead pixels.

fardeem 5 years ago |

This is easily top 1% of all writing on the internet

inoffensivename 5 years ago |

This was a thoroughly entertaining read, thank you!

philipdavis 5 years ago |

Question: do you think you will be arrested for doing the same thing if it was in your country? (A from myself: yes absolutely)

reillyse 5 years ago |

What a well written article. Really enjoyed that. If the hacking doesn't work out get a job writing about hacking...wait.

juststeve 5 years ago |

Australian here, he’s doing the best he can

abanayev 5 years ago |

Did anyone notice the line, “Update: I have been arrested”? Chekhov’s gun is just hanging there.

andrewnicolalde 5 years ago |

This has to be the funniest and most gratifying thing I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Great job!

ChrisRR 5 years ago |

That's a long read, has anyone got a blurb so I know what I'm getting myself into?

pmontra 5 years ago | |

Search for "tl; dr". It's a section at the end of the page with the summary.

ChrisRR 5 years ago | | |

Thanks

jeffbee 5 years ago |

Are passport numbers secrets?

andreareina 5 years ago | |

I'd say sensitive at the very least. Like social security numbers they shouldn't be, but when places use them for identification without checking authenticity and authorization...

ObsoleteNerd 5 years ago | |

They're a form of Government-issued photo ID, so not "secret" but definitely "sensitive".

At least in Australia, a passport can be used as your primary ID for a lot of stuff such as renting houses, buying mobile phones, connecting services to your home, booking flights, renting cars, etc etc etc.

macintux 5 years ago | |

Yes. The bottom of the post covers some of the things you can do with the number.

zbrozek 5 years ago | | |

Yet good luck traveling without actually surrendering them to all kinds of places you'd rather not. Like hotel clerks basically everywhere.

dependenttypes 5 years ago |

Is the passport number supposed to be secret? You show them when you buy alcohol in some countries as well to the police if they ask for it - all of these people can copy the number if they so wish.

razki 5 years ago |

Really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for redirecting my time brotheeeRRRR

half-kh-hacker 5 years ago |

I love Alex's stuff.

lanevorockz 5 years ago |

We are trying to fix this in the language ... It's just hard to convince people around that the change is worth it, I guess that I found the perfect use case.

Aeolun 5 years ago |

To be honest, I find it ridiculous (just like with social security numbers) how much you can apparently do just by virtue of knowing a passport number.

It shouldn’t work like that.

seapunk 5 years ago |

That is one of the best blog post I read for a long time.

Lorin 5 years ago |

"Unblending the smoothie" is such a great line.

nl 5 years ago |

Interestingly (and strangely) some frequent flyer numbers are treated by Australian airlines as confidential information.

pachico 5 years ago |

What a fun article to read! Congratulations!

gkanai 5 years ago |

This was a great read! Highly recommended.

bassie2 5 years ago |

Clicking Inspect Element in this post results in some fun as well (NSA Tracking cookies). A true Droste effect.

ztgasdf 5 years ago |

Really entertaining read. I'm amazed how much information they were able to get from the airline website.

michaelsitver 5 years ago |

One of the better blog posts I’ve read

pragmaticpandy 5 years ago |

> I’ve been practicing every morning at sunrise, but still can’t scan barcodes with my eyes.

rofl. Great writer.

dis-sys 5 years ago |

What is the big deal of knowing Tony Abbott's diplomatic passport number?

Lerain 5 years ago |

That was extremely entertaining and so much fun to read, thanks!

pietroppeter 5 years ago |

is there a book about basics of IT?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492554

ironfootnz 5 years ago |

That’s the best funny post about “CVE” I’ve ever read.

sellyme 5 years ago | |

How about this one: http://tom7.org/chess/cve.pdf

Sarcastic PDFs never stop being amusing to me.

marvinblum 5 years ago |

What a brilliant blog post. Thank you for posting it!

spyder 5 years ago |

It would've been faster and easier to report it to Instagram but this way it made a better story and educated the user better than instagram just removing the picture.

jslakro 5 years ago |

Most hilarious techie post I've read ever

imwm 5 years ago |

I can't believe how funny this writer is

soulofmischief 5 years ago |

When your simple blog page is crashing Spice and virt-viewer, there is a serious bloat problem. I can't even view this blog because it immediately crashes.

pragmaticpandy 5 years ago |

TIL McAfee® Gamer Security is a thing...

dmje 5 years ago |

Bloody love the way this guy writes...

kulesh 5 years ago |

Enjoyed the read very much, thanks.

nmeofthestate 5 years ago |

Looked interesting, but as an old fogey I just couldn't get past the "omg u guise yikes jklsflsfdjfds" style.

rootsudo 5 years ago |

Narrative is cute, but too much.

alottafunchata 5 years ago |

This was a great read--thanks!

JoachimS 5 years ago |

Highly entertaining reading.

kdtsh 5 years ago |

This is certifiably grouse.

tunnuz 5 years ago |

This entertained me a lot.

cottsak 5 years ago |

Alex, you are so funny!

FerretFred 5 years ago |

This is a great read!

brlnwest 5 years ago |

this is such a great story. Love the way he writes!

ddiddu 5 years ago |

it is easy to figure out passport number in a picture of ticket posted on Instagram

beervirus 5 years ago |

Well now I feel compelled to read everything this person has ever written.

jezze 5 years ago |

A friendly advice to the author of this article. Even though I enjoyed reading the whole thing, if you are gonna have a tl;dr in your article; put it at the start, not at the end. Almost felt lika a mockery.

tdy721 5 years ago |

This write up... irreverent and dumb. Did you study any Dave Barry? <3 I would love to buy a book. I mean probably not me, but if you need any moneys