Jerico Pictures Inc., doing business as National Public Data (“NPD”), exposed in April 2024 the personal information of nearly 2.9 billion individuals as a result of a data breach.
NPD is background check company that allows its customers to search billions of records with instant results.
In early April, 2024, a threat actor that uses the moniker of USDoD gained access to NPD’s network, and was able to exfiltrate unencrypted PII, including full names, Social Secutiy numbers, address history, and family information, of billions of individuals whose data is stored on NPD’s network.
On April 8, 2024, USDoD announced the sale of a “National Public Data” database on a dark web forum called Breached. It offered the 2.9 billion records for $3.5 million.
Researchers from VX-underground requested and received an advance copy of the data, reviewed the massive file – 277.1GB uncompressed, and confirmed that the data present in it is real and accurate. They also noticed that the database doesn’t contain information from individuals who use data opt-out services. People who did not use data opt-out services and resided in the United States were immediately found. The archive also contains data on deceased people.
A proposed class action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, Fort Lauderdale Division, on behalf of Christopher Hofmann, who said he received a notification from his identity theft protection service provider the month before that his data was on the dark web due to a data breach.
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