By Raphael Satter
WASHINGTON, Sept 2 (Reuters) – The FBI said on Wednesday it was investigating a report that tens of millions of drivers’ licenses belonging to people in the United States and Canada were being sold on the dark web.
On Tuesday, the independent journalist Brian Krebs said he had discovered a dark web site selling digital scans of millions of drivers’ licenses from people in the U.S. and Canada. He said he confirmed the authenticity of the data being sold with nine people.
In a brief statement on Wednesday, the bureau said it was “looking into the incident” but could not comment “due to the ongoing nature of the investigation.”
The breach, if confirmed, could be one of the largest-ever exposures of government-issued identity documents in North America, creating risks of identity theft and fraud for tens of millions of people.
Krebs said he was alerted to the site after it was advertised on a Russian cybercrime forum, with his own driver’s license being offered as a free sample. Krebs said the service, dubbed Nexus, claimed to have tens of millions of licenses for people in the U.S. and Canada, as well as millions of other identification cards and travel documents and hundreds of thousands of medical records. Krebs said that the site appeared to be updating its database of stolen data in real time, indicating that it was being fed by a live breach.
Zach Edwards, a threat researcher at the cybersecurity company Infoblox, said the incident was unprecedented in terms of its sweep.
“There’s never been a breach of driver’s licenses at this scale,” said Edwards, who added that his own license was available for sale on the site. Edwards said that the ongoing nature of the breach “means that this attack created legitimate national security risks for high-profile individuals.”
Reuters could not establish the source of the stolen data. Krebs quoted a representative of New Orleans-based identity verification provider IDScan.net as saying that it was investigating the matter. IDScan.net, which describes itself as providing “ID fraud prevention at scale,” did not return repeated messages from Reuters.
Krebs said the dark web site offering the driver’s license data vanished shortly after he published his report.
(Reporting by Raphael Satter, Editing by Franklin Paul, David Gregorio and Sanjeev Miglani)
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