The Record reported that Toronto Crime Stoppers stopped taking tips late on Wednesday. CBC had reported that a breach exposed over 1.5 million tips gathered by Crime Stoppers groups nationwide. CBC reviewed hacked files from Distributed Denial of Secrets and reached more than a dozen tipsters. About half of the tips it studied held personal details, and some were 25 years old. Toronto's chapter said it chose to pause because the reporting showed its anonymity promise was broken. Its vendor, Navigate360, said 176,859 Toronto tips were stolen and held 14,973 names.
Navigate360 could not say whether those names belong to tipsters, suspects or both. Toronto's lawyers have asked many times for the tip text, and Navigate360 has not answered. The sources do not say how the attackers got in. No restart date has been given. The national association and Navigate360 had not replied to The Record. A group called Internet Yiff Machine claimed the March attack.
Tip forms ask for no name, yet free-text stories can carry personal details; about half the tips CBC studied did. Some leaked tips are 25 years old, so storage ran long. Buyers can ask vendors what is stored per tip, how long, what a breach notice must say, and whether they can see what was taken.