Hansa image metadata potentially mirrored

I just had a shower thought and had to share!

This is all speculation but we all remember Hansa's image server supposedly having issues and vendors being asked to reupload their images. There was also a mention of vendors being socially engineered into providing some information in an interview.

You probably see where I'm doing with this!

What if LE disabled EXIF data wiping on Hansa and were trying to trick vendors into uploading their GPS coordinates? Way back on SR1 a lot of vendors were found to be uploading unsanitised pictures taken on camera phones. Since then markets have implemented EXIF wiping... in the same way as LE may have backdoored auto-PGP they may have fucked with EXIF wiping and mirrored the images in their original state.

I suggest all vendors check their images and if you find GPS coordinates in them clean/abandon that location!

In the future use a plain old dumb camera and clean your metadata yourself!


Comments


[35 Points] InsanityDRM:

This is totally plausible, however any knowledgeable vendor worth his salt strips his own exif data.

Leaving the market to strip it is no different to using the markets PGP encryption feature as a pose to doing it on your PC.


[5 Points] fa-yeerrr:

Good call.

And some people here keeps telling everyone to stay calm. Riiiight. Nice try bro.


[5 Points] seventhaccount7:

This sounds very plausible, good thinking. I know most vendors probably strip their own data, but it would not surprise me if a largeee number of them didn't.


[5 Points] HugBunter:

Hansa's image uploads didn't store the original image, they converted them to a Base-64 encoded string and stored them in the database, stripping everything. This is something I considered, but they may not have thought to do, just because of how the image uploads worked. In the last few days the market was up, I didn't see any change to the image uploads in terms of images being hosted as Base-64, but that is not to say they didn't start storing the originals anywhere or extracting any EXIF data in the upload process.


[2 Points] Pimp_alex_ab:

This is true they removed/saved pictures of vendors, for investigations maybe. They are doing some few arrests in NL atm i see on the news


[2 Points] None:

Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well.