isaan.live — About four months after a notorious hacking grup claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive individual information from a major data broker, a anggota of the grup has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen individual data.
The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Publik Information Research Grup.
“If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning” than prior breaches, Murray said in an interviu. “And if people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them.”
According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking grup USDoD claimed in April to have stolen individual records of 2.9 billion people from National Publik Data, which offers individual information to employers, privat investigators, staffing agencies and others doing latar belakang checks. The grup offered in a komunitas for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity ahli said in a post on X.
The lawsuit was reported by Bloomberg Law.
Last week, a purported anggota of USDoD identified only as Felice told the hacking komunitas that they were offering “the full NPD database,” according to a screenshot taken by BleepingComputer. The information consists of about 2.7 billion records, each of which includes a person’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, along with alternate names and birth dates, Felice claimed.
National Publik Data didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor has it formally notified people about the alleged breach. It has, however, been telling people who kontaked it lewat e-mail that “we are aware of certain third-party claims about consumer data and are investigating these issues.”
In that e-mail, the company also said that it had “purged the entire database, as a whole, of any and all entries, essentially opting everyone out.” As a result, it said, it has deleted any “non-public individual information” about people, although it added, “We may be required to retain certain records to comply with legal obligations.”
Several news tokos that konsentrasi on cybersecurity have looked at portions of the data Felice offered and said they appear to be real people’s actual information. If the leaked material is what it’s claimed to be, here are some of the risks posed and the steps you can take to proteksi yourself.
The threat of ID theft
The leak purports to provide much of the information that banks, insurance companies and servis providers seek when creating accounts — and when granting a request to change the sandi on an existing akun.
A few key pieces appeared to be missing from the hackers’ haul. One is e-mail addresses, which many people use to log on to serviss. Another is driver’s license or passport photos, which some governmental agencies rely on to verify identities.
Still, Murray of PIRG said that bad actors could do “all kinds of things” with the leaked information, the most worrisome probably being to try to take over someone’s accounts — including those associated with their bank, investments, insurance policies and e-mail. With your name, Social Security number, date of birth and mailing address, a fraudster could create fake accounts in your name or try to talk someone into resetting the sandi on one of your existing accounts.
“For somebody who’s really suave at it,” Murray said, “the possibilities are really endless.”
It’s also possible that criminals could use information from previous data breaches to add e-mail addresses to the data from the reported National Publik Data leak. Armed with all that, Murray said, “you can cause all kinds of chaos, commit all kinds of crimes, steal all kinds of money.”
How to proteksi yourself
Data breaches have been so common over the years, some security experts say sensitive information about you is almost certainly available in the dark corners of the internet. And there are a lot of people capable of finding it; VPNRanks, a web that rates virtual privat network serviss, estimates that 5 million people a day will akses the dark website through the anonymizing TOR browser, although only a portion of them will be up to no good.
If you suspek that your Social Security number or other important identifying information about you has been leaked, experts say you should put a freeze on your kredit files at the three major kredit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. You can do so for free, and it will prevent criminals from taking out loans, signing up for kredit cards and opening financial accounts under your name. The catch is that you’ll need to remember to lift the freeze temporarily if you are obtaining or applying for something that requires a kredit cek.