The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced on Wednesday (September 2) that they are conducting an investigation into an incident discussed in a news report which stated that more than 153 million American and Canadian driver’s license data is being sold on the dark web.
Independent journalist Brian Krebs revealed on Tuesday that he had discovered a dark web marketplace selling scanned files of American and Canadian driver’s licenses.
Krebs mentioned that on Monday, a source alerted him of an advertisement on a Russian cybercrime forum, Exploit, offering a service that claimed to provide digital scans of identification documents for over 170 million people in North America.
The source specifically pointed out this service to Krebs because the operator of this identity theft service had displayed Krebs’ Virginia driver’s license as a free sample.
The service, known as Nexus, claimed to offer not only driver’s license data for over 153 million individuals in the US and Canada but also digital scans of over 10 million identity cards, over 3 million travel documents and international IDs, and at least 579,000 medical cards.
Krebs noted that a quick look at Nexus would suggest that their claim of having 153 million driver’s license data is likely not an exaggeration.
He verified the authenticity of the data being sold by reaching out to nine relevant individuals.
In a brief statement released on Wednesday, the FBI mentioned they are “investigating the incident” but due to the ongoing investigation, they could not provide further comments.
If confirmed, this could potentially become one of the largest government-issued identity document data breaches in North America’s history, posing identity theft and fraud risks to millions of people.
Krebs mentioned that the website appears to be continuously updating its stolen identity information database in real-time, indicating it is obtaining data from an ongoing data theft operation.
Krebs cited a representative from IDScan.net, an identity verification service provider based in New Orleans, Louisiana, who is investigating the matter.
Shortly after Krebs published this report, the dark web providing driver’s license data disappeared.
(Reference: Reuters)