A new lawsuit is claiming hackers have gained access to the personal information of “billions of individuals,” including their Social Security numbers, current and past addresses and the names of siblings and parents — personal data that could allow fraudsters to infiltrate financial accounts or take out loans in their names.

The allegation arose in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by Christopher Hofmann, a California resident who claims his identity theft protection service alerted him that his personal information had been leaked to the dark web by the “nationalpublicdata.com” breach. The lawsuit was earlier reported by Bloomberg Law.

The breach allegedly occurred around April 2024, with a hacker group called USDoD exfiltrating the unencrypted personal information of billions of individuals from a company called National Public Data (NPD), a background check company, according to the lawsuit. Earlier this month, a hacker leaked a version of the stolen NPD data for free on a hacking forum, tech site Bleeping Computer reported.

  • ShepherdPie
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    28 days ago

    Does anybody know the process to unfreeze? I froze mine years and years ago but I don’t recall setting a pin or even remember what it was if I did. It’s going to be a huge PITA next time I need a loan for something. I’ve nearly almost signed up for a new credit card before remembering that I froze all my accounts and abandoning the process because if the aforementioned PITA.

    • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
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      28 days ago

      They may have sent you an email with the PIN but if you weren’t paying close attention you could have missed it. If you save your emails it may be worth doing a search.