Data Broker has a database of over 100 million people who have been swiped online and put up for sale
- Hacker found himself selling a database of more than 180 million emails on the dark web
- The archive was stolen from a data broker
- The data broker confirmed that the information was taken from public sources
A hacker is selling a database containing 183 million records of people’s contact information, including email addresses, stolen from a data broker who in turn generated them by harvesting publicly available data.
You could say no harm, no foul, but still whoever buys this database gets the chance to annoy millions of people with spam and possibly even target them with phishing, malware and business email compromise (BEC).
The database, which contains business email addresses, postal addresses, telephone numbers, employer names, job titles and links to various social media outlets, is being sold by a threat actor alias ‘KryptonZambie’, for $6,000.
Dismantled legacy systems
The archive was stolen from a data broker called DemandScience (formerly known as Pure Incubation), who confirmed that the data was initially publicly available.
“It is also important to note that we process publicly available business contact information and do not collect, store or process consumer data or any form of login credentials or sensitive personal information, including accounts, passwords, home addresses or other personal, non-business information,” said a spokesperson for DemandScience in an email.
HaveIBeenPwned?, a website that tracks email addresses compromised in various data breaches, reports that the archive was pulled from a “dismantled legacy system”: “In early 2024, a large corpus of data from DemandScience (a company owned by Pure Incubation). for sale on a popular hacking forum. Later attributed to a leak from a decommissioned legacy system, the breach included extensive data that was largely business contact information collected from public sources.
We don’t know if the hacker was able to sell the database yet, or if there were multiple buyers. At the time of writing, there was no information about abuse in the wild.
Via The Register
