Lawsuit filed in potential data breach impacting billions

Raylynn Atkinson says she has been burdened by something she never saw coming: Her identity has been stolen, and she's been dealing with the fallout for months.

"We have eight kids, seven grandbabies. My credit is frozen. I cannot use my credit or a credit card," she told Scripps News on a break from her job as a dental assistant in Utah.

In January, she had lost her previous job and while she was trying to get on unemployment assistance, she says she discovered that other people had been using her Social Security number with their employers, at places she says she's never worked before.

"At every job I go to, I take my identification and I know that the employer is verifying my identification. If everybody did that then there would be nobody like me sitting around not being able to collect the privileges that I have as a working American," she said.

Atkinson has filed police reports in jurisdictions where her Social Security number has been used. She still doesn't know who stole it, or how it was stolen. She is in the process of getting a new Social Security number, she says.

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"[I'm] the one that suffers [from] whoever's using my Social Security number. They're not having any reprimands for it," said Atkinson.

This kind of frustration could be felt by others in what could be the largest data breach in history. The company allegedly at the center of the breach is now facing a class-action lawsuit.

According to the complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida, the background-check company National Public Data exposed the information of billions of individuals as early as April.

That information, according to the lawsuit, later showed up on a dark web hacker forum, with cybercriminal group USDoD claiming to have taken the personal information of 2.9 billion people, including full names, addresses, Social Security numbers and information about relatives.

National Public Data did not respond to requests to confirm a breach.

"This is a lot of very sensitive information. It's out there," said Chris Nottingham, security engineering manager at Check Point Software Technologies.

Nottingham says the question is, where did it come from?

"We have some information from the parties that perpetrated the data theft saying this is where they got it, but we really don't have anything, any hard conclusive evidence to say this data really did come from National Public Data," said Nottingham.

For now, experts say it's a good idea to freeze your credit and even your child's credit profile. It also would be wise to sign up for credit monitoring and identity theft protection.

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