Brazilian police arrested the hacker who stole everyone's social security number.
The entity involved in the data breach has recently filed for bankruptcy.
The Federal Police of Brazil has announced the arrest of a hacker linked to a security breach that resulted in the leakage of 2.9 billion records, including sensitive personal data, such as some Social Security numbers. This data breach, which was revealed in August, was put up for sale on the dark web in April by an entity that identified itself as USDoD. According to a press release from the department, the hacker was connected to "two publications that sold" data from the federal police. Additionally, it was mentioned that he boasted about having leaked the personal information of 80,000 members of the FBI's InfraGard program.
Security researchers from Atlas have created a tool to investigate the leaked records and commented that the breach includes approximately 272 million unique Social Security numbers, as well as up to 600 million phone numbers. The company National Public Data and its parent, Jerico Pictures, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month due to an increase in lawsuits and potential penalties related to the incident.
According to the statement, "the person under investigation will be held accountable for the crime of hacking a computer device, qualified by obtaining information, with an increased penalty for the commercialization of the obtained data." The operation to arrest the hacker was dubbed "Operation Data Breach," and the federal police have stated that they will continue to investigate whether the hacker carried out other intrusions.
