Having popped back to this post because I was just linking it in a dw-maint comment explaining the whole saga of LJ and the Lying Liars who Lie, please allow me to practice some thread necromancy: if I'm remembering my timing correctly, I had (prior to everything blowing to hell at the end of May 2020) been trying to find any specific data marketplace that was listing anything LJ-related, and came across references to (but never an actual listing for) what I believe is the file that eventually made it to Troy and to us. The people who spoke of it called it "X million LiveJournal accounts, captured June/July 2014".
We sliced and diced the information as much as we could and a few people with very good (or very bad) email retention habits just confused us more. My ultimate conclusion is that LJ was correct about one small detail in their giant ball of lies about the whole situation: it was a concatenation of several other files' data. Unfortunately for LJ, that only shows that their servers were, in fact, compromised much longer than they thought.
(Honestly, even two years later, my money is on datacenter employee running a side hustle. I heard a lot of FSB/Russian government theorizing at the time: the Russian government doesn't need to hack LiveJournal, they already own it.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-02-05 04:04 am (UTC)We sliced and diced the information as much as we could and a few people with very good (or very bad) email retention habits just confused us more. My ultimate conclusion is that LJ was correct about one small detail in their giant ball of lies about the whole situation: it was a concatenation of several other files' data. Unfortunately for LJ, that only shows that their servers were, in fact, compromised much longer than they thought.
(Honestly, even two years later, my money is on datacenter employee running a side hustle. I heard a lot of FSB/Russian government theorizing at the time: the Russian government doesn't need to hack LiveJournal, they already own it.)