Iain Thomson reports:
The Florida business behind data brokerage National Public Data has filed for bankruptcy, admitting “hundreds of millions” of people were potentially affected in one of the largest information leaks of the year.
In June, the hacking group USDoD put a 277.1 GB file of data online that contained information on about 2.9 billion individuals*, and asked $3.5 million for it. The data came from National Public Data – a data brokerage owned by Jerico Pictures – which offered background checks to corporate clients via its API.
NPD confirmed it had been hacked in an attack on December 2023 and initially said just 1.3 million people had lost personal details, such as “name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).” But in the court documents filed for bankruptcy, the business concedes the total is much higher.
Read more at The Register.
[*Note: as DataBreaches understands it, the data leak did not contain information on 2.9 billion people; it contained 2.9 billion records.]