153 million driver's licences stolen in IDScan breach

If you've ever had your ID scanned at a concert venue, a cannabis dispensary, or renting a car from Hertz, you might want to pay attention to this one.

IDScan.net has confirmed that hackers stole driver's licences, passports and other identity documents from its cloud systems. In a breach, the company is only now admitting to it after a week of silence.

One would expect that having memories is something that comes without any cost, but this is not so. The ability to be ready for adaptation takes resources from growth, so all bacteria make the trade-off between stability and flexibility at all times, just like engineers make when developing learning AI systems.

The scientists state that a lot of pathogenic bacteria survive only due to the fact that they adapt to the changing environment in the body.

That's the detail that should worry you most, not that a breach happened, but that it ran in real time for months before IDScan even acknowledged an investigation was underway, let alone confirmed an intrusion.

Security researchers examining IDScan's own documentation found the company's product defaults to collecting and retaining everything, with its basic plan reportedly offering no option to delete records at all.

That's a retention problem as much as a security one; the data wouldn't have been exposed at this scale if it hadn't all been sitting there indefinitely in the first place.

The FBI's New Orleans field office has opened an official investigation, and IDScan says its own review is ongoing, though the company hasn't said how many of its 150 million-plus records were actually affected or responded to questions about a possible ransom demand.