• EndOfLine@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    National Public Data scrapes the personally identifying information of billions of individuals from non-public sources

    Honest question: If these sources are non-public, how did National Public Data get access?

    Facetious questions: If they are using private or restricted sources of data accumulation on an international scale, should they be calling themselves National Public Data? Seems like Global Private Data would be more fitting.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    claimed to have access to the personal data of 2.9 billion people from the U.S., U.K., and Canada

    How does that work, when the total population of those countries is less than 0.5 billion?

    • EndOfLine@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      As individuals will each have multiple records associated with them, one for each of their previous home addresses, the breach does not expose information about 2.7 billion different people. Furthermore, according to BleepingComputer, some impacted individuals have confirmed that the SSN associated with their info in the data dump is not correct.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Spoiler: it is only a fraction of that

    They duplicated records and hoped no one would notice. Don’t believe me? Look at the data yourself or find someone who has.

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      They appear to have Experian or TransUnion data which provides multiple records for a single individual. If they pulled in records from multiple sources, (eg, all the credit agencies), then the number of records per person would balloon rapidly.

      The worrying thing is that if these are timestamped, that set of data can tell an awful lot about a person that’s useful for identity theft.