2.9 billion hit in one of the largest data breaches ever — full names, addresses and SSNs exposed
2.9 billion hit in one of the largest data breaches ever — full names, addresses and SSNs exposed
The personal data of 2.9 billion people, which includes full names, former and complete addresses going back 30 years, Social Security Numbers, and more, was stolen from National Public Data by a cybercriminal group that goes by the name USDoD. The complaint goes on to explain that the hackers then tried to sell this huge collection of personal data on the dark web to the tune of $3.5 million. It's worth noting that due to the sheer number of people affected, this data likely comes from both the U.S. and other countries around the world.
What makes the way National Public Data did this more concerning is that the firm scraped personally identifiable information (PII) of billions of people from non-public sources. As a result, many of the people who are now involved in the class action lawsuit did not provide their data to the company willingly.
What exactly makes this company so different from the hacking group that breached them? Why should they be treated differently?
I feel like that might be bad phrasing on the part of the article. They mainly aggregate public records, like legal document style public records, and they also scrapped data from not-(public record) data, which isn't the same as (not-public) record data.
I feel like I would want more details to be sure though, but scrapping usually refers to "generally available" data.
Same with the big three credit reporting bureaus Equifax and whoever the fuck. Did anyone ever give them permission to horde all of their personal info? I don’t think so.
All depends on the terms of use from those that provide the data to them that they scraped from. I bet they never expected a customer to do it.
Oh well I feel at this point every man woman and child already had this done to them in United States and our government not doing shit about it.
Stack on another “Free monitoring, 2 years”
This one is way more than just the US.
With a breach of this size, I think we're officially at the point where the data about enough people is out there and knowledge based questions for security should be considered unsafe. We need to come up with different authentication methods.
We have different authentication methods. The hard bit is persuading people to use them.
Before people can be persuaded to use them, we have to persuade or force the companies and sites to support them.
Passkeys. They’re amazing.
Pirate keys for sure. Not using one is just asking for a stranger to grab your booty.
I want a stranger to grab my ass sometime
Pirate keys for sure.
Arrr.... SA to ye all!
Start using Yubikeys and telling companies that don't support them to support them.
And again they will fail to punish the company responsible for protecting this data for their criminal neglience.
Because that might damage shareholder value
It really should. The shareholders did profit from not investing in security until the incident. Let them suffer.
Any company accumulating, aggregating, and centralizing every piece of private and public information under the sun about people is a ticking time bomb (and that is a lot of companies these days).
We need harsher penalties for these assholes, and a privacy amendment so that we actually have some rights when dealing with them.
Go ahead, steal my identity. See if you have any better luck with it.
I keep all my credit reports frozen. These days, everyone should.
Dang, that’s quite a few people. Maybe we can stop linking our identity to a simple number in the US sometime? That would be swell.
There are only 1 billion SSNs possible with 9 digits, and at most around 350M living people who have them (the US population). This breach is international but SSN is a US thing.
And not all 9-digit numbers are used, so there are fewer than a billion. It sucks when organizations store them because the search space is so small it's relatively easy to unhash them in a stolen database.
A lot of businesses use the last 4 digits separately for some purposes, which means that even if it's salted, you are only getting 110,000 total options, which is trivial to run through.
9 digit social security number specifically might be, but a unique number tied to you that is often used as identification when it really shouldn't isn't, it's a shitshow that has been implemented in many countries around the world.
The Finnish version was called an SSN originally for example, though now its a "henkilötunnus", personal identity code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number
Do TINs overlap with SSNs? Because businesses and non-citizen taxpayers have TINs instead of SSNs, but they're used just the same.
This I don't know. I remember reading that around 70%(?) of SSNs have been allocated, and there are enough left for a few decades. No idea whether corporation TINs come from that. I believe non-citizen taxpayers get similar SSNs to citizens. IDK if they pay into social security and collect benefits the same way.
It sounds like a bad breach, and I'm not arguing against that. I just want to point out my doubts that there were ever 2.9 billion Americans since the founding of the nation, let alone since social security numbers became a thing. Maybe if I bothered to read the article, it would make more sense.
Okay, but I'm not sure how revelant that is. The article doesn't say only Americans were affected, it says the exact opposite.
[...] this data likely comes from both the U.S. and other countries around the world.
There's something like 330 million Americans currently alive, give or take. Social Security began in 1935, so that's 89 years ago. For the sake of making the math easy for a dumb Lemmy comment, let's figure the population at the time was two thirds of what it is today at 220 million, and we can figure that within the margin of error virtually all of them are dead. Yes there are some Americans between the ages of 90 and 111 but they likely didn't have social security numbers as children; the practice of assigning a SSN at birth happened later when they tied it to a tax credit for having kids; at first you got a SSN when you got your first job so anyone who was under the age of 15 or so in 1935 wouldn't have been given one.
So let's figure 220 million Americans who have since died, and 330 Americans who are still alive, have held social security numbers. That's 550 million SSNs total. Rough back of the napkin math.
Why guess at the 1935 pop instead of just looking it up?
It was about 127 million.
The SSN itself is limited to under 1 billion possible permutations anyway because the format is 9 total digits. (3 digits hyphen 2 digits hyphen 4 digits.)
And if I recall they also have something weird with the state you were born roughly corresponding to which 3 digit prefix you're issued. Obviously that isn't purely true either because that would only give you about 1 million unique numbers per prefix.
Either way they've gotta be close to the theoretical maximum of the format without recycling numbers.
Lol, yeah "National Public Data" has records of over 3 billion people going back 30 years and these people live all over the world, so it seems.
How did this company leak 2.9 billion people's info, including SSNs, when the population of the US is only ~350M?
Is "National Public Data" collecting info on everyone internationally? So many questions...
I just assume ssn is for a us audience and its worlwide with equivalent numbers but who knows. I mean there are only 8 bil on the planet so thats like everyone except maybe china, india, and africa
Read the article? Your questions are answered there.
When applying to a US government position with a certain security clearance, they will do background checks of you, your family and extended family, if need be.
And I'm sure that can be the case for any employer who needs background checks. That being said, I also suspect some of these people in the database are dead.
I like how my social security card explicitly says not to be for identification and tax purposes only. But I need for absolutely fucking everything and to identify I'm a citizen. Can hardly sign up for a new email without a SSN. (Exaggerating of course about the email)
to identify I'm a citizen.
It's kinda worse than that --- it's used to authenticate yourself as a citizen.
My SSN should at most be an ID, no different from a name. I can identify myself as Darth Vader or 4200-69-1337, but that shouldn't matter, because I should never be able to authenticate myself as either of those.
I think you miss typed a number, that one doesnt seem to be working
Alrighty, brainstorming time people. If you could write some practical laws, what protections do we need to stop these from happening.
I'm thinking 3 categories: Reporting, oversight, and accountability.
Reporting: all entities holding personally identifiable information (PII) must reach out once every 12 months. This hopefully unveils seedy brokers relying on obscurity. Maybe a policy to postpone notification up to 5 years (something like that) may be available as opt-in.
Oversight: targets of PII have oversight of what is collected/used. Sensitive information may be purged permanently upon request.
Accountability: set minimum fines for types of data stored. This monetary risk can then be calculated and factored into business operations. Unnecessary data would be a liability and worth purging.
Ok, bit of an outlandish idea, but how about something like:
Wow, you just reminded me of a data use policy I wrote up when I was young and sent a data broker after a security breach!
They laughed at me.
You and I think alike here.
How about a government-sponsored, non-profit authentication service? That is, it should be impossible to get a loan, open a line of credit, or anything else in somebody's name, without the lending institution verifying that it's actually on behalf of the named individual. Eliminate the security-through-obscurity technique of using bits of easily-leaked personal information as a poor substitute for actual authentication.
I mean, (as a comparative example) I have to go through an OAuth2 consent dialog to connect a third-party app to my email account, yet somebody can saddle me with huge debts based on knowing a 9-digit number that just about everybody knows? It's the system that's broken, tightening up the laws on PII is just a band-aid.
The US system is broken. I have a tax file number in Australia, which is the broad equivalent of a US SSN, and you know what someone can do with it if they also have my name and DOB? Fuck-all, except file my taxes for me, because you can't use it as an identifier anywhere else than the Australian tax office.
If I want a loan or a credit card or to open a bank account or any number of things , I need enough verifiable documents including photo ID to satisfy the other party that I am really them. Basically it's a points system where any form of government photo ID gives you about 80 points and any other item of identifiable data gives you 10-20 points and usually you have to clear 100 points to be "identified".
So my passport plus my driver's licence is enough. My driver's licence plus my non photo ID government Medicare card or my official original copy of my birth certificate is enough. My driver's licence and two bank or credit cards is enough. About 5 or 6 things like my birth certificate, electricity bills in my name or local government rates notices and bank cards is sometimes enough, although photo ID from somewhere is usually required, or you need a statutory declaration from someone in good standing saying that you are who you say you are.
This kind of thing, while slightly more inconvenient, requires a number of physical items that can't be easily stolen en-masse. I carry enough of them in my wallet that I can do anything I need to do, as my driver's licence provides photo ID. People who don't drive or have a passport can scrape together enough bits and pieces to usually get by.
So it's time for a change. But it doesn't have to involve technology or a huge shift in the way of doing things. It just requires a points system similar to what I describe. Whether the US can effect that change now with the millions of systems that rely on a SSN for a trivial key in a database in some small retailer somewhere, I don't know.
This so much. In fact, go a step further and have a few competing auth services, with some regulatory oversight for managing that much pii.
Oversight: I would add a mandatory security audit annually, that they have to pay for, and which occurs during a given quarter at random (so you can't "put on your best face" for a single day).
The security audit cost is partially subsidized if they agree to a second audit 6-9 months after the first (tax funded).
Accountability: I would add Prison time as a minimum penalty for the CEO and CIO, and the punitive damages must be a percentage of their profits (no flat rates), which is in addition to any compensatory damages awarded to plaintiffs. The penalty shall be used to help pay for future audits.
I think we also need levels of PII or something, maybe a completely different framework.
There’s this pattern I see at work where you want to have a user identifiable by some key, so you generate that key when an account is created and then you can pass that around instead of someone’s actual name or anything. The problem though, is that as soon as you link that value to user details anywhere in your system that value itself becomes PII because it could be used to correlate more relevant PII in other parts of your system. This viral property it has creates a situation where a stupid percentage of your data must be considered PII because the only way it isn’t is if it can be shown that there is no way to link the data to anybody’s personal information across every data store in the company.
So why is this a problem? Because if all data is sensitive none of it is. It creates situations where the production systems are so locked down that the only way for engineers to do basic operations is to bend the rules, and inevitably they will.
Anyway, I don’t know what the solution is but I expect data leaks will continue to be common passed the point when the situation is obviously unsustainable
Identity theft monitoring services always scare me. It seems like you are dumping a huge amount of information into a single system and just hoping the vendor is secure. I have access to one but refuse to put much information in. Is this mindset incorrect?
It reminds me of the recent Crowdstrike fiasco: apparently kernel level access was needed for their anti-malware to be able to properly work (because that way their net can cover the entire OS basically), but that high level of access meant that when CrowdStrike fucked up with an update, people's computers were useless. (Disclaimer, I am not a cybersecurity person and am not offering judgement either way on whether Crowdstrike's claim about kernel level access was bullshit or not)
In a similar way, in order for identity theft monitoring services to work, they surely will need to hold a heckton of data about you. This is fine if they can be trusted to hold that data securely, but otherwise... ¯_ (ツ)_/¯
I share your unease, though I don't feel able to comment on the correctness of your mindset. Though I will say that on an individual level, keeping an eye on your credit reports in general (from the major credit agencies) will go a long way to helping there (rather than paying for serviced that give you a score and other fancy "features", you can request either free or v. low cost report which just has the important stuff you need to know.)
I also know that if you want to be extra cautious, you can manually freeze your credit so basically no new lines of credit can be opened in your name. This is most useful for people who have already been a victim of fraud, or they expect to be at risk (such as by shitty family, or a data breach). I don't know how one sets this up, but I know that if you did want to set up a new line of credit, you can call to unfreeze your credit, and then freeze it again when your application for the new credit is all done. I have a friend who has had this as their default for years now because of shitty family.
Yea that's a tough system to design for. Ideally you want sensitive stuff like that, where you don't care what the data is just that something matches it, stored as the results of a one-way hash function.
The problem is that most of the data you're going to want to secure is pathetically tiny. 10 digit SSN? My phone can brute force that in a few minutes if you're doing raw hashes. Gotta salt them. But now you have a tradeoff decision, salting every one uniquely is best but now your comparison needs to do [leaked data] × [customers] checks to find matches. Same salt on all of them and as soon as one is cracked they all are.
Who TF is "National Public Data?"
A company not dumb enough to store anything in the EU, that's who. They'd be in real trouble now! Phew.
You're kidding, right?
I tried freezing my credit but I think transunion and equifax wouldn't let me create an account for some reason. Asking me to call them. Anybody else running into the same issue?
I know Ticketmaster just sent out millions of "sorry we got hacked, freeze your credit for free with this code" letters. Maybe they're struggling to keep up with demand.
Mine was for credit monitoring. You should be able to freeze your credit for free at any time
Are you proxying or using a VPN to access their site. I often see IP blocks, even if that proxy is a simple socks proxy to a VPS i own. Many VPS subnets are blocked/restricted wholesale, as are many of the big VPN endpoint ips.
Yes. They'll want to send you a letter with a passcode via the post office because of the breaches.
2 billion social security numbers? What's the population of the US?
More than US.
Is there a simple way to find out if your Information was in this leak, and what information it is? I use haveibeenpwned for leaks linked to my email address, but from I read in this article, it's not linked to my email address.
So how do I found out if my data was leaked without paying for a credit monitoring service?
We got notified by email from the credit monitoring our credit card provides.
Otherwise, how would the republicans get enough votes.
Worth noting looks like this breach was first reported at the start of June
There is a small silver lining, according to the VX team: "The database DOES NOT contain information from individuals who use data opt-out services. Every person who used some sort of data opt-out service was not present." So, we guess this is a good lesson in opting out.
Wonder what the best opt-out service is.
This explains why I've been getting so many Indian scam calls the last few days.
What's with these companies nobody has heard of causing massive fuck ups?
It's capitalism. Do you hate America or something?