Data broker has database of over 100 million people swiped and put up for sale online

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Need 180+million emails? You'll need to pay up

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(Image credit: Image by Muhammad Ribkhan from Pixabay)
  • Hacker found selling a database of 180+million emails on the dark web
  • The archive was stolen from a data broker
  • The data broker confirmed the information was scraped from public sources

A hacker is selling a database containing 183 million records of people’s contact details, including email addresses, stolen from a data broker who, in turn, generated it by scraping publicly available data.

One might say, no harm - no foul, but still, whoever buys this database will get 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 includes people’s business email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, employer names, job titles, and links to various social media, is being sold by a threat actor alias ‘KryptonZambie’, for $6,000.

Decommissioned legacy systems

The archive was stolen from a data broker company called DemandScience (previously known as Pure Incubation) who has confirmed the data was publicly available to start with.

"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 type of credential information or sensitive personal information including accounts, passwords, home addresses or other personal, non-business information," a DemandScience spokesperson said in an email.

HaveIBeenPwned?, a website that tracks email addresses compromised in various data breaches, reports that the archive was pulled from a “decommissioned legacy system: “In early 2024, a large corpus of data from DemandScience (a company owned by Pure Incubation), appeared for sale on a popular hacking forum. Later attributed to a leak from a decommissioned legacy system, the breach contained extensive data that was largely business contact information aggregated from public sources.”

We don’t know if the hacker managed to sell the database already, or if there were multiple buyers. At press time, there was no information of in-the-wild abuse.

Via The Register

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Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.