Billions of Records Exposed in Hack of Background-Check Service
News recently broke that the systems of National Public Data (a background-check service) were pilfered by hackers. This resulted in the data of 2.9 billion people being stolen. Some of impacted data seems to have included Social Security numbers.
National Public Data joins the list of other third-party services that have been hacked in recent months. Notably, AU10TIX, an identity-verification service used by many of the major tech platforms, and third-party IT vendor Outabox have fallen victim. Many individuals’ privacy was compromised, exposing their information to nefarious actors.
This trend shouldn’t surprise anyone – nor should it necessarily be taken as a scathing condemnation of the victimized services. Their clients surely should assess whether unacceptable technological failures or human errors contributed to these incidents and proceed from there to assess whether to continue working with these services. However, the unshakable reality is that a world in which people hand their information over to more databases is a world in which more data breaches occur. Cybersecurity is a difficult business, and it is inevitable that hackers will get the better of security professionals at least some of the time.
This is why it is so crucial that policymakers avoid passing legislation that degrades technology companies’ ability to offer secure devices and systems or that requires users to distribute their data to more databases as a precondition to accessing basic internet services. These kinds of proposals create a more dangerous digital environment in which the average person’s privacy is increasingly at risk.
Policymakers must manage all manner of competing priorities and weigh tradeoffs. Too often, cybersecurity concerns simply get waved away. There is an assumption among many that technological innovation will simply progress and conform to secure users, no matter what regulatory choices are made. As recent history shows, this is little more than fancy.
Published on September 5, 2024