Pierluigi Paganini
August 17, 2024
Background check service National Public Data confirms that a threat actor has breached its systems and had access to millions of social security numbers and other sensitive personal information.
According to a statement published by the company, exposed data include the name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es) of the impacted individuals.
The company states that the security incident may have occurred in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024.
“There appears to have been a data security incident that may have involved some of your personal information. The incident is believed to have involved a third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024. We conducted an investigation and subsequent information has come to light.” reads the statement published by the company. “The information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).”
The company cooperated with law enforcement and governmental investigators and launched an investigation to determine the scope of the incident.
National Public Data announced it has also implemented additional security measures in an effort to prevent other incidents in the future.
The company is notifying impacted individuals and advising them to take preventive measures to help prevent and detect any misuse of their information. The organization recommends the impacted individuals closely monitor their financial accounts and report any unauthorized activity to their financial institution. The company also offered a free credit monitoring service.
On April 8, a threat actor that uses the moniker of USDoD announced the sale of a “National Public Data” database on a dark web forum.
USDoD attempted to sell the personal data of 2.9 billion individuals, they put the data up for sale for $3,500,000.
“On April 8, a cybercriminal group by the name of USDoD posted a database entitled “National Public Data” on a dark web forum, claiming to have the personal data of 2.9 billion people, according to the complaint filed Thursday in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, which said the group put the database up for sale for $3.5 million.” reported Bloomberg law.
The experts pointed out that this data breach could be among the biggest ever.
The National Public Data gathers data on billions of individuals by scraping their personally identifying information from non-public sources. The plaintiff and class members did not knowingly provide their PII to the defendant.
“This class action arises out of the data breach that upon information and belief occurred in or around April of 2024 involving Defendant NPD (the “Data Breach”), a background check company that allows its customers to search billions of records with instant results.” reads the complaint filed Thursday in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. “Plaintiff brings this Complaint against Defendant for its failure to properly secure and safeguard the personally identifiable information that it collected and maintained as part of its regular business practices. Upon information and belief, such sensitive information includes, but is not limited to, Plaintiff’s and Class Members’ full names; current and past addresses (spanning at least the last three decades); Social Security numbers; information about parents, siblings, and other relatives (including some who have been deceased for nearly 20 years); and/or other personal information (collectively defined herein as “PII”).”
Researchers from VX-underground reviewed the archive (277.1GB uncompressed) and confirmed the that data is real and accurate. The experts noticed that the database doesn’t contain information from individuals who use data opt-out services. People who did not use data opt-out services and resided in the United States were immediately found. The archive also contains data on deceased individuals.
The popular cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt, the founder of the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) data breach notification service, reported that the version of the NPD database he analyzed contained only 134 million unique email addresses.
“Many of these files are archives themselves, with many of those then containing yet more archives. I went through and recursively extracted everything which resulted in a total corpus of 642GB of uncompressed data across more than 1k files. If this is “partial”, what was the story with the 80GB “partial” from last month? Who knows, but in the in those files above were 134M unique email addresses.” wrote Hunt.
The leak of the National Public Data database has led to a class action lawsuit against Jerico Picture which operates the NPD.
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