Recent data breaches at two of the largest online background check services resulted in sensitive data on millions of their users being leaked online.
PeopleConnect, the company that owns both affected organizations, confirmed the attack on TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate.
Background checkers are services that enable people to conduct background checks on others. People can use these services to group publicly available data that would otherwise take a long time to gather, whether they are looking to hire someone or for any other reason: federal, state, or court records, criminal records, social media data, and so on.
To use the services, they must subscribe, and hackers have now acquired the data of these subscribers. Someone published a thread on the Breached hacking forum in late January, claiming to have obtained sensitive data on 20.22 million customers of the aforementioned companies who had utilized it by April 16, 2019.
Almost 12 million of those were Instant Checkmate users, and 8.2 million were TruthFinder users. Other service providers own approximately 4.6K of the remaining accounts. The attackers stole identity data in the incident, including email addresses, hashed passwords, full names, and phone numbers.
PeopleConnect confirmed the breach shortly after the post.
"We learned recently that a list, including name, email, telephone number in some instances, as well as securely encrypted passwords and expired and inactive password reset tokens, of TruthFinder subscribers was being discussed and made available in an online forum," the company said.
"We have confirmed that the list was created several years ago and appears to include all customer accounts created between 2011 and 2019. The published list originated inside our company."
PeopleConnect stated that it will know more once its investigation is completed, but initial reports indicate that this was either a "inadvertent leak or theft of a specific list."
