Virtually All Of Our Personal Information Has Been Posted Online
Most Americans don’t even realize that virtually all of their personal information has been stolen and posted online for free. The personal records of 2.9 billion people were stolen from a major data broker known as National Public Data earlier this year, and this month almost of the information that was stolen was posted online for anyone to freely take.
We are talking about names, addresses, phone numbers, employment histories, birth dates and Social Security numbers. This is one of the most egregious privacy violations in the history of the world, but hardly anyone knows what has happened. So please share this article as widely as you possibly can.
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USA Today is reporting that the original theft of this data occurred “in or around April 2024.″
An enormous amount of Social Security numbers and other sensitive information for millions of people could be in the hands of a hacking group after a data breach and may have been released on an online marketplace, The Los Angeles Times reported this week.
The hacking group USDoD claimed it had allegedly stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reported by Bloomberg Law. The breach was believed to have happened in or around April 2024, according to the lawsuit.
The company that this data was stolen from is a Florida-based background check company known as National Public Data. The following is what Wikipedia has to say about this particular firm.
Jerico Pictures, Inc., doing business as National Public Data[1][2] is a data broker company that performs employee background checks. Their primary service is collecting information from public data sources, including criminal records, addresses, and employment history, and offering that information for sale.
Of course there are hordes of other data brokers out there these days. They collect vast troves of information on as many people as they possibly can, and then they monetize that information in various ways.
Equifax, Epsilon and Acxiom are the three largest data brokers in existence today. Each one of them brings in more than 2 billion dollars of revenue annually.
As you can see, collecting and selling our personal information is very big business. And when one of these data brokers gets hacked, it is a major disaster for all of us.
One member of the hacking group that stole this data claims to have “the full NPD database.”
Last week, a purported member of USDoD identified only as Felice told the hacking forum that they were offering “the full NPD database,” according to a screenshot taken by BleepingComputer. The information consists of about 2.7 billion records, each of which includes a person’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, along with alternate names and birth dates, Felice claimed.
How much damage could criminals do to your life if they had your name, address, phone number, employment history, date of birth and Social Security number? You might want to think about that.
According to a law firm that is involved in litigation over this matter, a total of 277.1 gigabytes of data were stolen.
The class-action law firm Schubert, Jonckheer & Kolbe said in a press release that the stolen file includes 277.1 gigabytes of data, and includes names, address histories, relatives and Social Security numbers dating back at least three decades.
According to a post from a cybersecurity expert on X, formerly Twitter, USDoD claims to be selling the 2.9 billion records for citizens of the U.S., U.K. and Canada on the dark web for $3.5 million.
You may not want anyone to know where you were living 30 years ago. But now just about anyone can easily find out, because the vast majority of the information that was stolen has been posted online for free.
About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data.
The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
“If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning” than prior breaches, Murray said in an interview. “And if people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them.”
Read that last paragraph again. An entire dossier on your life is just sitting out there, and virtually anyone that has a vendetta against you can access it.
So what can we do to protect ourselves?
Some experts are encouraging people to make certain that their antivirus programs are up to date. I think that is definitely a good idea, but I don’t know how that will protect anyone from information that has already been stolen.
It is also being suggested that people should update their passwords. Needless to say, this is something that everyone should be doing on a regular basis anyway.
In the weeks and months ahead, keeping a close eye on your credit report will be important. If your identity is being used by someone, you don’t want that to go unchecked for very long or else your credit could be ruined.
But ultimately there is not much that you can do to keep nefarious individuals from accessing personal information that is being freely copied and passed around the Internet. To a very large degree, the damage has already been done.
It is being projected that cybercrime will cost the world 10.5 trillion dollars annually by the year 2025.
Just like everywhere else in our society, there are vast hordes of predators on the Internet that are relentlessly searching for new victims, and this is yet another sign that our society is in an extremely advanced stage of decay.
We should have never allowed ourselves to become so dependent on the Internet, but there is no going back now.
Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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