[Sportschosun Reporter Jang Jong-ho] More than 150 million driver’s-license records in the United States are reportedly believed to have been exposed in a hacking incident, causing widespread concern.
The leaked information reportedly included not only names and driver’s-license numbers but also identification numbers from other government-issued IDs, including passports. Concerns about large-scale identity theft have grown after reports that photos of some driver’s licenses could also be viewed on the dark web.
According to U.S. technology news outlet TechCrunch, IDScan, an identity-verification company based in Louisiana, officially confirmed on the 4th, local time, that customer information in its cloud system may have been accessed and copied without authorization.
IDScan had previously said only that it was investigating the incident. In its latest announcement, however, the company acknowledged that hackers had extracted driver’s-license-related information stored in its cloud system.
The company said the potentially exposed information could include customers’ names, driver’s-license numbers, and numbers from government-issued identification documents such as passports. It has not yet disclosed how many people were actually affected or the overall amount of information that was taken.
The incident came to light after cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs discovered a suspicious website on the dark web on the 1st.
Krebs confirmed that the site enabled users to conduct bulk searches of driver’s-license information belonging to people living in the United States and Canada. More than 150 million driver’s-license records had reportedly been uploaded, and some entries apparently included images of the actual licenses.
To verify the data, Krebs searched for his own driver’s-license information and confirmed that his actual record was included. It was later revealed that information belonging to prominent figures, including U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, was also in the database.
The incident is particularly concerning because the leaked information was not limited to names or phone numbers; it reportedly included images of government-issued identification documents.
Driver’s licenses contain a range of information that can be used to verify identity, including names, dates of birth, addresses, license numbers, and facial photographs. Experts have noted that the damage could persist for a long time because, unlike a password, this information cannot simply be replaced with a new number immediately after it is leaked.
Even more seriously, the data may have included not only information collected in the past but also records created recently.
There were also indications that driver’s-license records were continuing to be added. Approximately 400,000 new records were reportedly added over a 24-hour period, raising the possibility that hackers were not merely releasing old data all at once but were continuously extracting new information from an identity-verification system.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has therefore begun investigating the incident.
The FBI has not released specific details, citing the ongoing investigation. IDScan also said that its investigation is still underway and that the exact scale of the damage and the method of intrusion require further confirmation.
Meanwhile, IDScan has provided identity-verification services to a variety of businesses across the United States. Its services have been used by entertainment venues, rental-car companies, and financial businesses to verify whether customers’ identification documents are genuine.
Jang Jong-ho, bellho@sportschosun.com
This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.
Click Here For The Original Source.
