What to Know About the Latest Social Security Number Breach

The details are murky. In April, Hackmanac, a cybersecurity company, posted on X that about 2.9 billion records of personal data were for sale, from people in the United States, Canada and Britain. The data was supposedly stolen from National Public Data, a company that does background checks.

That company became the target of a class-action suit, which Bloomberg Law recently reported, contending that thieves got Social Security numbers in the breach. Bleeping Computer, a technology and security publication, rounded up reports of hackers leaking batches of the data.

We may never know the extent of the breach and the subsequent leak. But I’m not sure the details matter much.

Security breaches happen all the time. Thieves frequently find vulnerabilities in large systems and exploit them.

Our lack of data privacy and security is intensely hateful, but in the short and medium term, the only thing we can do is lock ourselves down as best we can.

Here are some reminders about how to do it.

Control Anxiety

Remember, some thieves steal simply because they can. If they don’t try to use stolen information, you don’t have a problem.