153 Million Driver's Licenses for Sale on the Dark Web

Bruce Schneier flagged yet another major leak of personal data on his blog: a database containing information on 153 million driver's licenses has been put up for sale on one of the dark web's resources. The details are laid out by the well-known investigative journalist Brian Krebs.

The sheer scale of the haul speaks for itself — we're talking about tens of millions of people whose documents have ended up circulating freely on illegal marketplaces. Driver's license data holds particular appeal for fraudsters: it is frequently used for identity theft, taking out loans, and bypassing identity verification procedures.

Schneier's brief note doesn't reveal any more specifics about the database's origin, its contents, or the exact source of the leak — he simply links to Krebs's piece, which, he says, offers more detail.

Incidents like this stopped being a rarity long ago, yet each new case is a reminder of a simple pattern: the more personal information accumulates in centralized databases, the higher the cost of a mistake in protecting it. A leak affecting upwards of a hundred and fifty million records is not an abstract statistic but a very real risk to specific individuals, whose data can now be bought from anonymous sellers.

Source: Schneier on Security