If you ever needed more proof that governments pressuring companies to collect ID data from customers or users is a bad idea, you only have to look at what happened this week. A dark-web service advertised on August 31 has been offering over 153 million scans of driver’s licenses, more than 10 million other identity cards, over 3 million travel documents and/or international IDs, and at least 579,000 medical cards.
The data apparently stems from a company hired to verify people’s identities. The service, called Nexus, was advertised on the Russian-language cybercrime forum Exploit.
“… searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).”
