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Welcome back to Unbias.

Today is Thursday August 15th, and this is your final news rundown of the week. I'll spare you my usual

pre- episode reminder but if you've been around a while you know what to do and without

further ado we can get into today's stories starting with a data breach. This story actually dates back to April, but there was sort of a new event last week that adds to it.

So back in April, a hacker known as US DoD claimed to be selling 2.9 billion records

containing personal information of people in the United States, the UK, and Canada.

The data consisted of social Security numbers, names,

addresses all obtained from a database belonging

to an entity known as National Public Data.

National Public Data, or NPD, is in the business of collecting data on people

from various parts of the web and then reselling that data to use in background checks

for private investigators, etc.

But since the April breach and since US DoD

tried selling this data for three and a half million dollars,

various hackers have started releasing partial

copies of the data with each leak sharing a different number of records and

sometimes different data. But then last week on August 6th a new hacker entered the scene, Fennis, and he or she

leaked the most complete version of the stolen data for free on a hacking

forum called Breach. Now why would a hacker release data for free and not try to sell it? I don't know, but it's raised questions about the accuracy and completeness of the data.

Fennis, who was the one who leaked it last week, said the data breach was actually not conducted by US DoD, but by a hacker known as X or SXUL.

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