New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords to its back-end database in a file that was freely available from its homepage until today.
In April, a cybercriminal named USDoD began selling data stolen from NPD. In July, someone leaked what was taken, including the names, addresses, phone numbers and in some cases email addresses for more than 272 million people (including many who are now deceased).
NPD acknowledged the intrusion on Aug. 12, saying it dates back to a security incident in December 2023. In an interview last week, USDoD blamed the July data leak on another malicious hacker who also had access to the company’s database, which they claimed has been floating around the underground since December 2023.
Following last week’s story on the breadth of the NPD breach, a reader alerted KrebsOnSecurity that a sister NPD property — the background search service recordscheck.net — was hosting an archive that included the usernames and password for the site’s administrator.
A review of that archive, which was available from the Records Check website until just before publication this morning (August 19), shows it includes the source code and plain text usernames and passwords for different components of recordscheck.net, which is visually similar to nationalpublicdata.com and features identical login pages.
The exposed archive, which was named “members.zip,” indicates RecordsCheck users were all initial ..
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