Billions of personal data stolen in Florida data breach. Were you one of them?

ORLANDO, Florida. – “I found out that I was a victim of the National Public Data Breach.”

That's not the kind of quote we'd normally hear from a cybersecurity expert, but that's exactly what Rob Allen, chief product officer of ThreatLocker, a cybersecurity firm based in Orlando, told News 6 on Thursday.

The conversation centered on reports that billions of pieces of personal information had been stolen from National Public Data (NPD), a background check company based in Coral Springs.

According to a class action lawsuit filed in South Florida on August 1, NPD was hacked in April. Billions of individual pieces of data were stolen by a criminal gang using the code name “USDoD.”

In that lawsuit – filed by Christopher Hofmann of California – Hofmann says he received an alert from his identity theft protection service back in July, telling him that his personal information and social security numbers (SSN) had been found on the dark web due to the NPD breach.

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The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Department of Defense claimed to have stolen the personal information of up to 2.9 billion people. The gang offered the database online in April for a price of $3.5 million.

But according to tech news site BleepingComputer, others have already released various copies of the stolen data. A hacker named “Fenice” has released the most complete version of the data for free on an online forum, the site reports.

“It's important to note that a person has multiple records, one for each address they have documented living at,” BleepingComputer wrote. “This also means that this data breach did not affect 3 billion people, as has been falsely reported in many articles that did not properly research the data.”

Meanwhile, Allen received an email from Have I Been Pwned.com confirming that he was one of at least 133 million people affected by the data breach.

The extent of the violation has not yet been confirmed, but on Tuesday the NPD published a Disclosure of violations to its website and acknowledges that personal information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, and mailing addresses, may have been accessed.

Class action law firm Schubert, Jonckheer & Kolbe LLP announced earlier this week that the stolen information reportedly includes over 277 gigabytes of data dating back at least three decades.

“Because the individuals did not explicitly share their private information with NPD, they may not even know they were affected,” the law firm wrote. “To date, NPD has not confirmed the breach or the information that may have been stolen.”

In addition, the law firm warns that anyone whose private information is affected by the breach could be at risk of identity theft, financial fraud or other data breaches.

Click here to check if your email address has been affected by a data breach.

The full class action lawsuit is attached to this story and can be read below.

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