Brazilian police arrested the hacker who stole everyone’s SSN

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Federal Police of Brazil announced the arrest of the hacker linked to a breach that leaked 2.9 billion records that included sensitive personal information, including some Social Security numbers. The data from that hack, which came to light in August, was put for sale on the dark web in April by an entity identifying themselves as USDoD. As pointed out by Bleeping Computer, according to a machine translation of the department’s press release, the hacker was linked to “two publications selling” federal police data. The hacker also boasted of disclosing the personal data of 80,000 members of the FBI’s InfraGard program, the department said. Security researchers at Atlas have created a tool to search the leaked records and told PCMag that the leak contains about 272 million unique SSNs, along with as many as 600 million phone numbers. National Public Data and its parent company, Jerico Pictures, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month, facing a flood of lawsuits and potential penalties over the incident. “The person under investigation must answer for the crime of hacking into a computer device, qualified by obtaining information, with an increase in the sentence for the commercialization of the data obtained,” according to the translation. The operation to arrest the hacker was called “Operation Data Breach.” The federal police says it will continue to investigate if the hacker made any other breaches.