A massive data breach exposes 2.7 billion records of Americans’ personal information on a hacker forum.

According to reports from BleepingComputer, nearly 2.7 billion records containing personal data of Americans have been leaked in a hacker forum. This includes information such as names, social securityNumbers, physical addresses and possible aliases. The data comes from National Public Data, which sells personal information to private investigators, for example. Many people have already confirmed the data, but there are also errors.

Leaked data

About 2.7 billion records containing personal information from people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada were allegedly leaked on a hacker forum. This data comes from National Public Data, a company that collects and sells personal information for background checks. Numerous people have already confirmed the authenticity of this information, but the document also contains errors.

The leaked data consists of two text files with a total size of 277 GB, containing almost 2.7 billion pure text records. Each of these records consists of the following information: name, postal addresses and the social securityPhone number, but also additional information such as names associated with the person. The data is not encrypted.

An important note here is that a person can have multiple records, one for each address they have been known to live at. So the impact is not on 2.7 billion people, but on 2.7 billion records.

This is not the first time such data has been leaked. In April, a collection of 2.9 billion records was offered for $3.5 million by the so-called USDoD. This threat actor then claimed that it contained records of every person in the three countries (United Kingdom, United States and Canada).