Months after a trove of personal data it had collected was stolen, US data broker National Public Data has filed for bankruptcy. In its filing the company admits that the number of people impacted by the data theft is much higher than previously reported.
Earlier this year personal data belonging to “hundreds of millions” of people was stolen from US data broker National Public Data. The company admitted to the scope of the theft in a bankruptcy filing. Several outlets are reporting on the story.
National Public Data indicated that the stolen data included names, addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers and social security numbers. National Public Data’s parent company Jerico Pictures admits that there are “hundreds of millions of potentially impacted individuals.” According to the news site TechCrunch, security experts estimate the number of stolen Social Security numbers to be around 270 million.
Of all the information stolen, the Social Security numbers are considered especially sensitive, because they can be used as proof of identity – meaning criminals could potentially use the information to commit identity theft.
Well, I suppose that that was going to happen sooner or later.
There are 334 million people in the US, so that’s probably just about everyone.
Yeah.
Including past breaches, it’s unclear if any adult American’s private information remains unbreached.
There’s an ongoing arm chair discussion happening among Cybersecurity folks of how many living adult humans with social security numbers haven’t been breached.
Are there eleven? Are there a thousand? Are there any? We don’t know. We do know it’s not many.
The good(?) news is that new adults are turning 18 every day, and entering their private information into the same systems, soon to be breached in the same ways. So that’s something? I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing, honestly.
Too bad, so sad. They filed bankruptcy, so it’s all good now. They’ll walk away with their billions and leave everyone to pick up the pieces.