Nearly 2.7 billion personal records at risk in possibly biggest data breach in US history

Almost 2.7 billion personal records have been posted to a popular hacking forum, which could rival the biggest data breaches in US history.

According to reports from Tom’s Hardware, the data has been posted on the forum, Breached, in full, after multiple partial versions were uploaded.

It is alleged that the information contained inside the massive 277GB breach contains details from United States, United Kingdom, and Canadian nationals.

The data reportedly revealed names, addresses, and even Social Security numbers that came from a data-scraping company, National Public Data.

National Public Data which is operated by patent company Jercho Pictures Inc. was the source of a recent court case taking place in the Southern District of Florida.

Bloomberg Law covered the case that plaintiff Christopher Hofmann brought forward against Jericho Pictures that centered around gross negligence of sensitive and personal data.

National Public Data scrapes non-public sources to collate data, which Hoffman also argues is not approved by the individuals who have their data compiled in this manner.

Jericho Pictures, nor National Public Data have commented since the massive 2.7 billion personal data breach happened, so it remains uncertain if they will purge or encrypt their existing data in an attempt to stem the fallout.

The individual, who goes by the handle Fenice uploaded the purloined data for free on the hacker forum, which was a more complete version of previous breaches.

It was alleged that prominent hacker USDoD was responsible for National Public Data’s information being leaked, but Fenice now lays the ownership in the hands of another hacker, SXUL.

SXUL is not mentioned in the case files that were a part of Hofmann v. Jerico Pictures, Inc., so this piece of information is unfounded, except for the testimony of Fenice, who posted the data to the forum.

If true, then USDoD may not be in the firing line for the data breach, despite the group attempting to sell the incomplete data set for $3.5 million.

If the data breach emerges as a true threat to personal data and sensitive information like Social Security numbers, then it would be ranked as one of the largest in United States history.

Image: Pixlr.

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