America's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster

In one line

The latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, now on Lawfare.

Opening excerpt

Last week, Krebs on Security broke the story of a newly launched dark web service calling itself Nexus that was selling access to identity documents, including 3 million travel documents and 153 million driver’s licenses from U.S. and Canadian citizens. This is a huge breach that not only will be used for run-of-the-mill cybercrime but also will feed the intelligence machines of America’s adversaries.

Nexus claimed that it had gained unauthorized access to a major identity verification company and had spent more than a year “continuously” exfiltrating new data into a private database. Krebs on Security noted that in a single day the number of licenses in the database increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting regular ingestion of new data.

Krebs on Security was able to verify that the driver’s licenses held by the service were genuine. In addition to Krebs’s own, it contained licenses from nine of his friends and family members. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, an assistant director at the FBI and other high-ranking U.S. government officials also had licenses in the mix.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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