A new lawsuit is claiming hackers have gained access to the personal information of “billions of individuals,” including their Social Security numbers, current and past addresses and the names of siblings and parents — personal data that could allow fraudsters to infiltrate financial accounts or take out loans in their names.
The allegation arose in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by Christopher Hofmann, a California resident who claims his identity theft protection service alerted him that his personal information had been leaked to the dark web by the “nationalpublicdata.com” breach. The lawsuit was earlier reported by Bloomberg Law.
The breach allegedly occurred around April 2024, with a hacker group called USDoD exfiltrating the unencrypted personal information of billions of individuals from a company called National Public Data (NPD), a background check company, according to the lawsuit. Earlier this month, a hacker leaked a version of the stolen NPD data for free on a hacking forum, tech site Bleeping Computer reported.
In the sense of “Simpsons did it!”:
Equifax did it first.
Sure wish the massive corporate incompetence and malfeasance causing huge data leaks multiple times over the years would get mentioned every time one of these stories comes up.
Hackers did blah, this WOULD ALMOST matter, but!
We need to start redirecting some of those board bonuses and CEO dollars back into infrastructure to actually secure this shit as a required responsibility and stop places from being allowed to request personal information they shouldn’t have.
These companies should be paying fines in the BILLIONS of dollars for their malfeasance. I got a notice from work this morning, this is horrifying.