A Florida data broker that this year lost hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information in a data breach filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as the company faces a wave of litigation.

The hacked data broker's parent company, National Public Data, said it was "highly unlikely" to be able to pay its debtors or address the anticipated liabilities and class-action lawsuits filed against it, including paying "for credit monitoring for hundreds of millions of potentially impacted individuals." Jericho Pictures stated this in its bankruptcy court filing in Florida.

The company "faces significant uncertainty in the form of regulatory challenges by the Federal Trade Commission and over 20 states, with civil penalties attached to data breaches," according to an initial filing by Jericho Pictures owner Salvatore Verini.
Bankruptcy in this week first appeared at PCMag.

Since April, a hacker boasting of selling stolen data called attention to having breached National Public Data, a breach affecting some 300 million people and called one of the biggest data breaches of the year.

According to the notice posted by the data broker on its website, the data stolen from the breach contains names, dates of birth, email and postal addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers. Since data brokers source information from different places, sometimes the information stolen was correct, sometimes it was incorrect, and much of it was about deceased persons.

The firm's stolen database contained around 270 million Social Security numbers, security researchers estimated.

Included in the bankruptcy filings is a valuation of the stolen database of Social Security numbers, which Verini pegged at $1 million. The filing lists several other databases the company maintains as assets, but does not provide corresponding valuations. These are licensed by the Drug Enforcement Administration to write prescriptions for controlled substances; those with concealed weapons permits; and banks of data that contain information on public records, such as marriages, divorces, bankruptcy filings, and international financial sanctions; among others.

Likely, lawsuits or enforcement action will not yield any money from this company, given what little is left in the company's coffers.

The bankruptcies filings showed that the data broker's insurance provider "declined coverage" after the breach and that the company had less than $75,000 in total assets. Much of the company's revenue went to purchasing bulk data, as well as to Verini's pay as the company's sole operator. In its bankruptcy filing, the company claimed net profits of $475,526 for 2022 and $865,149 for 2023.