TransUnion Credit Bureau Denies Security Breach Is To Blame For Private Data Leak

Consumer credit reporting agency TransUnion had tens of thousands of its users' data stolen and sold by a hacker, but the company is denying the compromised data was due to any security breach.

This past weekend, a threat actor known as USDoD was found trying to sell TransUnion user data on a hacker forum. Within the database was sensitive information of approximately 59,000 users worldwide. When Chicago-based credit reporting group TransUnion got wind of this, they launched an investigation into the matter. The company announced on its news site that "Immediately upon discovering these assertions, we partnered with outside cybersecurity and forensic experts to launch a thorough investigation".

From this however, TransUnion claims that the stolen data did not come from an internal systems breach, but possibly from a third party. The company announcement asserts that, "through our investigation, we have found that multiple aspects of the messages – including the data, formatting, and fields – do not match the data content or formats at TransUnion, indicating that any such data came from a third party." The credit reporting firm has neither determined nor revealed which third party (or parties) were hacked by USDoD, or what the next steps are, especially for current clients.

If USDoD sounds familiar, the person was involved in hacking the FBI’s InfraGuard US critical infrastructure intelligence portal in 2022 and attempting to sell the contact information of 80,000 private individuals on a hacker forum. Even more recently, USDoD made the news on September 11 for exposing the personal information of 3,200 Airbus vendors, while threatening to do the same to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. 

Nonetheless, we hope TransUnion quickly steps up to, at least, protect the data of the 59,000 people involved. TransUnion serves millions of users and more than 65,000 business globally, after all.