2.9 billion hit in one of the largest data breaches ever — full names, addresses and SSNs exposed

A complaint submitted to the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida claims the exposed personal data belongs to a public records data provider named National Public Data, which specializes in background checks and fraud prevention.

What's with these companies nobody has heard of causing massive fuck ups?

The personal data of 2.9 billion people, which includes full names, former and complete addresses going back 30 years, Social Security Numbers, and more, was stolen from National Public Data by a cybercriminal group that goes by the name USDoD. The complaint goes on to explain that the hackers then tried to sell this huge collection of personal data on the dark web to the tune of $3.5 million. It's worth noting that due to the sheer number of people affected, this data likely comes from both the U.S. and other countries around the world.

What makes the way National Public Data did this more concerning is that the firm scraped personally identifiable information (PII) of billions of people from non-public sources. As a result, many of the people who are now involved in the class action lawsuit did not provide their data to the company willingly.

What exactly makes this company so different from the hacking group that breached them? Why should they be treated differently?

Oh well I feel at this point every man woman and child already had this done to them in United States and our government not doing shit about it.

With a breach of this size, I think we're officially at the point where the data about enough people is out there and knowledge based questions for security should be considered unsafe. We need to come up with different authentication methods.

And again they will fail to punish the company responsible for protecting this data for their criminal neglience.

Any company accumulating, aggregating, and centralizing every piece of private and public information under the sun about people is a ticking time bomb (and that is a lot of companies these days).

We need harsher penalties for these assholes, and a privacy amendment so that we actually have some rights when dealing with them.

Go ahead, steal my identity. See if you have any better luck with it.

I keep all my credit reports frozen. These days, everyone should.

Dang, that’s quite a few people. Maybe we can stop linking our identity to a simple number in the US sometime? That would be swell.

"Please enter your full name, address and SSN to check if you were exposed!"

There are only 1 billion SSNs possible with 9 digits, and at most around 350M living people who have them (the US population). This breach is international but SSN is a US thing.

How did this company leak 2.9 billion people's info, including SSNs, when the population of the US is only ~350M?

Is "National Public Data" collecting info on everyone internationally? So many questions...

I like how my social security card explicitly says not to be for identification and tax purposes only. But I need for absolutely fucking everything and to identify I'm a citizen. Can hardly sign up for a new email without a SSN. (Exaggerating of course about the email)

Alrighty, brainstorming time people. If you could write some practical laws, what protections do we need to stop these from happening.

I'm thinking 3 categories: Reporting, oversight, and accountability.

Reporting: all entities holding personally identifiable information (PII) must reach out once every 12 months. This hopefully unveils seedy brokers relying on obscurity. Maybe a policy to postpone notification up to 5 years (something like that) may be available as opt-in.

Oversight: targets of PII have oversight of what is collected/used. Sensitive information may be purged permanently upon request.

Accountability: set minimum fines for types of data stored. This monetary risk can then be calculated and factored into business operations. Unnecessary data would be a liability and worth purging.

Identity theft monitoring services always scare me. It seems like you are dumping a huge amount of information into a single system and just hoping the vendor is secure. I have access to one but refuse to put much information in. Is this mindset incorrect?

It sounds like a bad breach, and I'm not arguing against that. I just want to point out my doubts that there were ever 2.9 billion Americans since the founding of the nation, let alone since social security numbers became a thing. Maybe if I bothered to read the article, it would make more sense.

Who TF is "National Public Data?"

I tried freezing my credit but I think transunion and equifax wouldn't let me create an account for some reason. Asking me to call them. Anybody else running into the same issue?

Good god. Thats like, every person that has ever used a computer probably. Fuck.

Is there a simple way to find out if your Information was in this leak, and what information it is? I use haveibeenpwned for leaks linked to my email address, but from I read in this article, it's not linked to my email address.

So how do I found out if my data was leaked without paying for a credit monitoring service?

2 billion social security numbers? What's the population of the US?

Otherwise, how would the republicans get enough votes.

the U.S. and other countries "around the world"

meaning, for those of us living on other planets, we are completely safe ... such a relief ! /s

Is this why I got the latest scam email saying I need to pay $4k in bitcoin else a video of me wanking would be leaked.

This explains why I've been getting so many Indian scam calls the last few days.

Worth noting looks like this breach was first reported at the start of June

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/03/usdod_data_dump/