Government acts on Land Registry fears

The government is stopping downloads of some documents from the Land Registry website following newspaper reports that the site was being exploited by fraudsters. The Mail on Sunday reported criminal gangs have stolen £12m by downloading documents from the site and using them to commit mortgage frauds. From midnight tonight …

[Barry Crosby]

Never mind Lilley..

..I'm more concerned that criminal gangs use first generation iMacs to steal our identities. Maybe Jobs' mob hid secret powers to steal identities within the depths of Mr. Ive's designer silicon?

On a more serious note, was the stock shot of "a woman at keyboard" necessary to illustrate this news item by the Mail? I'd imagine it was a close call between "woman at keyboard" and "lesbian asylum seeker stealing identity to lower house prices".

[Piers]

They really don't think these things through...

...do they? "lets put it all online" seems like SUCH a good idea. 'course, none of this would have happened if everyone downloading had had a proper ID card.... : p

[Nano nano]

Cardboard cutout

Why didn't they just blank out the signature section

a) when scanning the original

or b) when fetching the image for display

[Anonymous Coward]

Filling in the blanks

If its the signatures that are the problem, why not blank them out?

Shouldn't be too difficult to semi-automate, assuming the signatures appear in a defined place (usually the end) rather than being scattered randomly throughout the documents.

Of course, the long term answer is not to scan any future documents but to require them to be created online in the first place. That would make it much easier to create a "safe to distribute" version for online download, omitting such parts as might be considered a security risk.

[Nigee]

Policy violation?

Doesn't govt infosec policy require a risk assessment before systems are developed? Blind Freddy should have seen this one coming. Too much to hope that the moron concerned will be sacked for incompetance.

Land Titles are the Crown Jewels of developed economies. If the land title system ceases to be trustworthy then the economy of the affected country has had it. Welcome to the third world.