Almost 2.7 billion records of personal information for people in the United States were leaked on a hacking forum, exposing names, social security numbers, all known physical addresses, and possible aliases.
The data allegedly comes from National Public Data, a company that collects and sells access to personal data for use in background checks, to obtain criminal records, and for private investigators.
National Public Data is believed to scrape this information from public sources to compile individual user profiles for people in the US and other countries.
In April, a threat actor known as USDoD claimed to be selling 2.9 billion records containing the personal data of people in the US, UK, and Canada that was stolen from National Public Data.
At the time, the threat actor attempted to sell the data for $3.5 million and claimed it contained records for every person in the three countries.
USDoD is a known threat actor who was previously linked to an attempted sale of InfraGard’s user database in December 2023 for $50,000.
BleepingComputer, at the time, contacted National Public Data and never received a response to our email.
Stolen data leaked for free
Since then, various threat actors have released partial copies of the data, with each leak sharing a different number of records and, in some cases, different data.
On August 6th, a threat actor known as “Fenice” leaked the most complete version of the stolen National Public Data data for free on the Breached hacking forum.
However, Fenice says the data breach was conducted by another threat actor named “SXUL,” rather than USDoD.
The leaked data consists of two text files totaling 277GB and containing nearly 2.7 billion plaintext records, rather than the original 2.9 billion number originally shared by USDoD.
While BleepingComputer can’t confirm if this leak contains the data for every person in the US, numerous people have confirmed to us that it included their and family members’ legitimate information, including those who are deceased.
Each record consists of the following information – a person’s name, mailing addressesund social security number, with some records including additional information, like other names associated with the person. None of this data is encrypted.
Previously leaked samples of this data also included phone numbers and email addresses, but these are not included in this 2.7 billion record leak.
It is important to note that a person will have multiple records, one for each address they are known to have lived. This also means that this data breach did not impact 3 billion people as has been erroneously reported in many articles that did not properly research the data.
Some people have also told BleepingComputer that their social security numbers were associated with other people they don’t know, so not all the information is accurate.
Finally, this data may be outdated, as it does not contain the current address for any of the people we checked, potentially indicating that the data was taken from an old backup.
The data breach has led to multiple class action lawsuits against Jerico Pictures, which is believed to be doing business as National Public Data, for not adequately protecting people’s data.
If you live in the US, this data breach has likely leaked some of your personal information.
As the data contains hundreds of millions of social security numbers, it is suggested that you monitor your credit report for fraudulent activity and report it to the credit bureaus if detected.
Furthermore, as previously leaked samples also contained email addresses and phone numbers, you should be vigilant against phishing and SMS texts attempting to trick you into providing additional sensitive information.
