The notorious hacker USDoD, who is best known for high-profile data leaks, appears to be a man from Brazil, according to investigations conducted by CrowdStrike and others.

Over the past few years, USDoD, aka EquationCorp, has leaked vast amounts of information stolen from major organizations. His targets include the FBI’s InfraGard portal, Airbus, credit reporting firm TransUnion, background checking service National Public Data (NPD), and many others.

As social networks and porn sites move towards a verified identity model, the actions of one cybersecurity researcher show that ID verification services themselves could get hacked too.

A handful cryptographers were asked for feedback on the architecture of the European Identity Wallet (the Architecture Reference Framwork (ARF), currently at version 1.4.0). We seized the opportunity to write a short report to urge Europe to reconsider the design, and to base it on the use of anonymous (aka attribute-based) credentials.

Anonymous credentials were designed specifically to achieve authentication and identification that are both secure and privacy-preserving. As a result, they fully meet the requirements put forth in the eiDAS 2.0 regulation. (The current design does not.) Moreover, they are by now a mature technology. In particular we recommend to use the BBS family of anonymous credentials, which are efficient and mathematically proven secure.

Over 130 organizations have been compromised in a sophisticated attack using simple phishing kits