Members of a gang behind the recent mass-theft of data, including social security numbers of a significant number of people, has released a huge portion of the data on the dark web. This has given rise to fears of secondary cases of identity theft over the coming weeks and months.
Reports have placed the volume of data as containing around 3 billion records including names, addresses, date of birth, telephone numbers, and social security numbers. All of which could contribute further to cases of fraud, exploitation, and theft.
The Hack
USDoD stole a database from National Public Data, a data broker company that performs background checks, in April of this year. The full database was initially listed for sale for over $3m before later being released for free.
The Data
There appears to be some confusion around the numbers involved in this data theft. Some reports are suggesting the theft includes data of billions of people. However independent examination of the data corrects this as billions of records, with multiple records being related to a single individual. With this being the case, and the likely inclusion of corrupt or invalid records, the number of affected people quickly drops from the 3 billion figure but remains significant.
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