Yeah, I guess I was confused last week, because I still havent heard much about this hack. Just some rumors. But it was done by the same group, usDOD which is where I fell into the trap of, assuming.
Did get another email from haveibeenpwned about it though.
Doesnt really make sense.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#NationalPublicData
In April 2024, a large trove of data made headlines as having exposed "3 billion people" due to a breach of the National Public Data background check service. The initial corpus of data released in the breach contained billions of rows of personal information, including US social security numbers. Further partial data sets were later released including extensive personal information and 134M unique email addresses, although the origin and accuracy of the data remains in question. This breach has been flagged as "unverified" and a full description of the incident is in the link above.
https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-3-billion-people-national-public-data-breach/
Back then, the breach was attributed to "USDoD", a name to remember as you'll see that throughout this post. The embedded image is the first reference of the 2.9B number we've subsequently seen flashed all over the press, and it's right there alongside the request of $3.5M for the data. Clearly, there is a financial motive involved here, so keep that in mind as we dig further into the story. That image also refers to 200GB of compressed data that expands out to 4TB when uncompressed, but that's not what initially caught my eye. Instead, something quite obvious in the embedded image doesn't add up: if this data is "the entire population of USA, CA and UK" (which is ~450M people in total), what's the 2.9B number we keep seeing? Because that doesn't reconcile with reports about "nearly 3 billion people" with social security numbers exposed. Further, SSNs are a rather American construct with Canada having SINs (Social Insurance Number) and the UK having, well, NI (National Insurance) numbers are probably the closestequivalent. This is the constant theme you'll read about in this post, stuff just being a bit... off. But hyperbole is often a theme with incidents like this, so let's take the headlines with a grain of salt and see what the data tells us.
Many of these files are archives themselves, with many of those then containing yet more archives. I went through and recursively extracted everything which resulted in a total corpus of 642GB of uncompressed data across more than 1k files. If this is "partial", what was the story with the 80GB "partial" from last month? Who knows, but in the in those files above were 134M unique email addresses.
Just to take stock of where we're at, we've got the first set of SSN data which is legitimate and contains no email addresses yet is allegedly only a small part of the total NPD corpus. Then we've got this second set of data which is larger and has tens of millions of email addresses yet is pretty random in appearance. The burning question I was trying to answer is "is it legit?"
Nothings been verified, as of yet. Just seems like a ploy by usDOD to make easy money.
500 million people make up the primary white countries, with places like china and india getting close to the 2 billion mark each.
Yes white people are the worlds sole problem.
Yeah, I guess I was confused last week, because I still havent heard much about this hack. Just some rumors. But it was done by the same group, usDOD which is where I fell into the trap of, assuming.
Did get another email from haveibeenpwned about it though.
Doesnt really make sense.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#NationalPublicData
In April 2024, a large trove of data made headlines as having exposed "3 billion people" due to a breach of the National Public Data background check service. The initial corpus of data released in the breach contained billions of rows of personal information, including US social security numbers. Further partial data sets were later released including extensive personal information and 134M unique email addresses, although the origin and accuracy of the data remains in question. This breach has been flagged as "unverified" and a full description of the incident is in the link above.
https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-3-billion-people-national-public-data-breach/
Back then, the breach was attributed to "USDoD", a name to remember as you'll see that throughout this post. The embedded image is the first reference of the 2.9B number we've subsequently seen flashed all over the press, and it's right there alongside the request of $3.5M for the data. Clearly, there is a financial motive involved here, so keep that in mind as we dig further into the story. That image also refers to 200GB of compressed data that expands out to 4TB when uncompressed, but that's not what initially caught my eye. Instead, something quite obvious in the embedded image doesn't add up: if this data is "the entire population of USA, CA and UK" (which is ~450M people in total), what's the 2.9B number we keep seeing? Because that doesn't reconcile with reports about "nearly 3 billion people" with social security numbers exposed. Further, SSNs are a rather American construct with Canada having SINs (Social Insurance Number) and the UK having, well, NI (National Insurance) numbers are probably the closestequivalent. This is the constant theme you'll read about in this post, stuff just being a bit... off. But hyperbole is often a theme with incidents like this, so let's take the headlines with a grain of salt and see what the data tells us.
Many of these files are archives themselves, with many of those then containing yet more archives. I went through and recursively extracted everything which resulted in a total corpus of 642GB of uncompressed data across more than 1k files. If this is "partial", what was the story with the 80GB "partial" from last month? Who knows, but in the in those files above were 134M unique email addresses.
Just to take stock of where we're at, we've got the first set of SSN data which is legitimate and contains no email addresses yet is allegedly only a small part of the total NPD corpus. Then we've got this second set of data which is larger and has tens of millions of email addresses yet is pretty random in appearance. The burning question I was trying to answer is "is it legit?"
Nothings been verified, as of yet. Just seems like a ploy by usDOD to make easy money.
500 million people make up the primary white countries, with places like china and india getting close to the 2 billion mark each.
Yes white people are the worlds sole problem.
Yeah, I guess I was confused last week, because I still havent heard much about this hack. Just some rumors. But it was done by the same group, usDOD which is where I fell into the trap of, assuming.
Did get another email from haveibeenpwned about it though.
Doesnt really make sense.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#NationalPublicData
In April 2024, a large trove of data made headlines as having exposed "3 billion people" due to a breach of the National Public Data background check service. The initial corpus of data released in the breach contained billions of rows of personal information, including US social security numbers. Further partial data sets were later released including extensive personal information and 134M unique email addresses, although the origin and accuracy of the data remains in question. This breach has been flagged as "unverified" and a full description of the incident is in the link above.
https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-3-billion-people-national-public-data-breach/
Back then, the breach was attributed to "USDoD", a name to remember as you'll see that throughout this post. The embedded image is the first reference of the 2.9B number we've subsequently seen flashed all over the press, and it's right there alongside the request of $3.5M for the data. Clearly, there is a financial motive involved here, so keep that in mind as we dig further into the story. That image also refers to 200GB of compressed data that expands out to 4TB when uncompressed, but that's not what initially caught my eye. Instead, something quite obvious in the embedded image doesn't add up: if this data is "the entire population of USA, CA and UK" (which is ~450M people in total), what's the 2.9B number we keep seeing? Because that doesn't reconcile with reports about "nearly 3 billion people" with social security numbers exposed. Further, SSNs are a rather American construct with Canada having SINs (Social Insurance Number) and the UK having, well, NI (National Insurance) numbers are probably the closestequivalent. This is the constant theme you'll read about in this post, stuff just being a bit... off. But hyperbole is often a theme with incidents like this, so let's take the headlines with a grain of salt and see what the data tells us.
Nothings been verified, as of yet. Just seems like a ploy by usDOD to make easy money.
500 million people make up the primary white countries, with places like china and india getting close to the 2 billion mark each.
Yes white people are the worlds sole problem.