Allianz Life says 'majority' of customers' personal data stolen in cyberattack

Breach fatigue & sense of inevitability

• Many see this as just “another day, another breach,” reflecting industry-wide failure.
• Some argue truly secure cloud SaaS is impossible and critical data should be on-prem and even airgapped; others say that would just create different, often worse, risk and operational pain.
• There’s skepticism that this specific attack involved anything novel; social engineering against support/helpdesks is suspected.

Cloud CRM, Salesforce, and third parties

• Concern that “third-party, cloud-based CRM” is being used as a vague shield to shift blame.
• Salesforce is repeatedly mentioned as a likely candidate and criticized as hard to secure, easy to misconfigure, and poorly monitored.
• Even well-configured CRM instances often accumulate many deeply integrated systems, expanding the attack surface.

Incentives, liability, and regulation

• Core complaint: companies bear relatively little cost; customers bear most damage, similar to pollution externalities.
• Proposals include: very large per-record fines paid directly to affected individuals, GDPR-style revenue-based penalties with real enforcement, “corporate death penalty,” or jailing executives/boards for negligence.
• Others warn massive fines could collapse key firms or harm national economies, and that proving willful negligence is hard.
• Some see insurance as enabling underinvestment in security instead of funding real R&D.

Identity theft, authentication, and impact

• Several argue the term “identity theft” misplaces blame; the real failure is institutions issuing credit/loans with weak verification.
• Strong view that if a bank grants a loan to an impostor, the bank should own the loss and cleanup, not the victim.
• Debate over where user responsibility ends (e.g., dropped password note) and provider responsibility begins.
• Suggestions: stronger MFA and IdP federation, but worries about surveillance, biometrics that can’t be revoked, and data still being monetized for profiling.

Security difficulty and engineering culture

• One camp claims “building secure systems is trivial” and most breaches come from sloppy code, outdated libraries, and bad IAM.
• Others push back: large systems span legacy software, third-party SaaS, humans, and social engineering; in practice even well-funded orgs fail.
• Some compare desired regulation to aviation safety; others note data breaches don’t create visible “fireball” deaths, so society tolerates far more risk.

Encryption, data minimization, and alternative models

• End-to-end encryption is seen as one partial answer but limits search, analytics, and many CRM workflows.
• Suggestions include:
  • Treat personal data more like health data, with higher liability.
  • Centralized, highly regulated custodians (e.g., banks or a single identity provider) that issue revocable tokens instead of raw PII.
  • Strict minimization and banning long-term caching of sensitive data by random companies.

White-hat hacking and legal frameworks

• Some want strong legal protections for security researchers probing systems and responsibly disclosing flaws, arguing current laws mainly protect corporate embarrassment and reduce national security.
• Critics worry about giving “unsuccessful bad actors” an easy excuse and about accidental harm (e.g., knocking out power).
• Ideas floated: licenses/certifications for researchers, clearer laws that distinguish good-faith discovery from abuse, safe staging environments for critical infrastructure.
• Multiple anecdotes describe researchers being threatened with prosecution after responsibly reporting obvious flaws, leading them to report anonymously or not at all.

User experience and downstream harm

• Commenters describe having to upload sensitive financial documents for housing or loans and being resigned to eventual leaks.
• Frustration at vague breach notifications, token identity-monitoring offers, and lack of transparency about what data was actually exposed.