The Florida background check company that suffered a massive data breach recently is now facing eight different lawsuits as a result.
As part of the breach of the website National Public Data, millions of people’s sensitive personal information — including their Social Security numbers, names and addresses — were compromised. Now, the company that owns that website, Jericho Pictures Inc., is in hot water.
There have been eight separate class-action lawsuits filed against the company in U.S. District Court in Ft. Lauderdale since the beginning of this month.
National Public Data only recently acknowledged on their website that there was a breach, which they labeled a “data security incident” that happened from an attempted hack by a “third-party bad actor.”
That attack occurred in December of last year, the company said, and involved “potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024.”
The statement the company released didn’t specify how many people were affected by the breach, or which databases that the company owns were hacked. They did acknowledge that the information contained phone numbers, names, mailing and email addresses, and Social Security numbers.
According to the company’s website, they offer investigators and employers the ability to conduct background searches “for some of the lowest fees in the industry.”
Those who pay for the service can run background checks, vital records checks, assets checks, criminal records checks and much more, they say.
It was only on August 1 that details of the breach became public, after California resident Christopher Hoffman filed a suit against the company.
That suit says a hacking group called USDoD was behind the hack, and that they posted on a dark web forum back in April that they had the personal data of about 2.9 million people, according to a Bloomberg Law report.
According to the suit, the group posted the database of that stolen information for sale at $3.5 million.
The lawsuit that Hoffman filed also says the hackers were able to gain information about users’ past addresses and relatives, and that the data goes back more than 30 years.
Hoffman only found out about the breach in late July when an identity protection service he subscribes to sent him a notification that his information was part of the breach that happened at “nationalpublicdata.com.”
Seven other proposed class-action lawsuits were filed since August 1.
In the statement the company released about the breach, they said that victims should take some preventative measures, starting with closely monitoring all of their financial accounts to see if any unauthorized activity has taken place.
Free credit reports should also be obtained and browsed through to see if there’s any transactions or credit applications that seem out of place.
You can also place a fraud alert on your credit files, which would force creditors to contact you directly before any new accounts can be opened, or any changes to existing accounts can be made.
