Public Business Data Data Breach

What happened

In approximately August 2021, hundreds of gigabytes of business data collated from public sources was obtained and later published to a popular hacking forum. Sourced from a customer of Bureau van Dijk's (BvD) "Orbis" product, the corpus of data released contained hundreds of millions of lines about corporations and individuals, including personal information such as names and dates of birth. The data also included 28M unique email addresses along with physical addresses (presumedly corporate locations), phone numbers and job titles. There was no unauthorised access to BvD's systems, nor did the incident expose any of their or parent company's Moody's clients.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing Public Business Data — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Stay alert for smishing (SMS phishing) and SIM-swap attempts using your phone number.
• Exposed identity data raises identity-theft risk — consider credit monitoring or a credit freeze.
• Check whether your email address appears in this breach on haveibeenpwned.com.