National Public Data, a Florida-based background-check and people-search data broker operating under Jerico Pictures, Inc., suffered one of the largest identity data exposures in U.S. history when a threat actor known as USDoD offered a stolen dataset for sale on the dark web in April 2024. The attacker gained access through social engineering. The initial corpus reportedly contained billions of rows of personal records. Subsequent partial releases included 134 million unique email addresses. The origin and completeness of the data remains disputed, but the scale of the exposure drew widespread attention from security researchers and journalists. The exposed data included Social Security numbers, names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, gender information, and government-issued IDs. Social Security numbers are the most critical element in this exposure. Combined with the other identity fields, the dataset provides everything needed to impersonate an individual, open fraudulent accounts, file false tax returns, or conduct targeted harassment. Because National Public Data aggregated records from public and quasi-public sources, many affected individuals had no prior relationship with the company and were unaware their data was held there. National Public Data filed for bankruptcy in late 2024 following the fallout from the breach. Multiple class action lawsuits were filed on behalf of affected individuals. Regulators and consumer advocates raised concerns about the data broker industry's collection practices, particularly the aggregation of sensitive records without meaningful consent. People whose information was exposed should assume their Social Security number and personal identifiers are in circulation among bad actors and take immediate steps to place a credit freeze with all three major credit bureaus.

People-search and background-data brokers aggregate identity, address, phone, public-record, relative, and screening-related data into searchable consumer profiles.

National Public Data’s recent public profile has been defined by the fallout from the 2024 breach. Jerico Pictures, Inc., the original operator behind National Public Data, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2024, and the domain is now operated by a different people-search broker that states it has zero affiliation with Jerico Pictures while continuing to use the same nationalpublicdata.com address for a new public-records search business.