Security News > 2024 > August > That cyber-heist of 2.9B personal records? There's a class-action lawsuit looming for that

A lawsuit has accused a Florida data broker of carelessly failing to secure billions of records of people's private information, which was subsequently stolen from the biz and sold on an online criminal marketplace.

California resident Christopher Hofmann filed the potential class-action complaint against Jerico Pictures, doing business as National Public Data, a Coral Springs-based firm that provides APIs so that companies can perform things like background checks on people and look up folks' criminal records.

As such National Public Data holds a lot of highly personal information, which ended up being stolen in a cyberattack.

The data broker scrapes PII of "Potentially billions" of people, none of whom ever provided their information to National Public Data, the lawsuit, which references The Register's reporting, alleges.

Hofmann, on behalf of potentially millions of other plaintiffs, has asked the court to require National Public Data to destroy all personal information belonging to the class-action members and use encryption, among other data protection methods in the future.

The lawsuit also wants the background-check firm to implement an infosec program and employee training to help protect people's confidentiality, and it asks the judge to require that National Public Data hire third-party auditors and penetration testers to ensure that criminals can't break into its network and steal any more massive databases.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/05/national_public_data_lawsuit/