There has been a lot of publicity about a breach and then leak of data from National Public Data. Some early reports erroneously claimed that 2.9 billion people were affected. Other sources noted more accurately noted that 2.9 billion was the number of records and not the number of unique individuals.
In its disclosure to Maine on August 17, National Public Data (NPD) claims that a total of 1.3 million people were affected. That’s still a lot of people, but nowhere what was originally being claimed in news reports.
NPD’s website notification reads, in part:
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. What Information Was Involved? The information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).
The notification makes no mention of any complimentary mitigation services such as credit monitoring services. Given that class action lawsuits are already being filed, that may be part of any negotiated settlement at some point.
But were there really only 1.3 million unique people in a dataset with 2.9 billion records? In his analysis of the incident, Troy Hunt extrapolated from a sample to predict that there might be about 899 million unique SSNs in the data set. Granted that is just an extrapolation, but even so, it is significantly higher than 1.3 million.
Is NPD really sending out only 1.3 million notification letters or is there something inaccurate in their submission to the Maine Attorney’s General Office in terms of the total number affected? DataBreaches has emailed NPD to inquire. No reply was immediately available, but DataBreaches will update this post if a reply is received.