Cyber Analysis Group - CyberAGroup - OSINT Darkweb Investigations - Insider Threat - Crypto - Online threat & exposure - SOCMINT - Canadian
If you’ve handed over your ID at a car rental desk, a retail store, a casino, or a cannabis dispensary over the past few years, a digital scan of your driver’s license might be sitting on a dark web marketplace right now.
While recent headlines framed the 153 million driver’s license leak as a brand-new September 2026 event, the reality on the ground is much more concerning: this data didn't appear overnight. It has likely been silently accumulating, circulating, and selling among cybercriminals for years.
The breach recently gained public attention after investigative security researcher Brian Krebs exposed the dark web service Nexus, which hosted the database. Shortly after the news broke and federal law enforcement stepped in, Nexus went dark. However, secondary threat actors immediately moved to monetize the massive dataset. In a recent sales listing, a dark web seller operating under the name Skylabs claimed to possess the complete cache, offering it for sale and posting the following statement:
"Recently we heard about an incident that occurred regarding a driver's license data leak. We confirm the authenticity of the data, it has been obtained from IDScan... We have had this data for years now, and we were shocked to hear that Nexus was selling... Now their Blog is dead, the FBI is investigating this, the data is around 153 million. We have complete information about this data, and this is the user's lifetime identity."
While their claim hasn't been independently verified, according to the Skylabs sales listing, the exfiltrated dataset contains over 170 million total records, broken down across the following document types:
Driver's Licenses: 153,347,439 records
Identification Cards: 10,335,678 records
Uncategorized Documents: 5,092,107 records
Travel Documents: 1,924,144 records
International DL/IDs: 1,379,886 records
Medical Cards: 579,201 records
Common Access Cards (CAC): 429,314 records
Residence Cards: 91,873 records
Employment Authorizations: 77,155 records
The Skylabs listing specifically identified the following companies as part of the impacted ecosystem:
Travel & Automotive: Hertz, Shell, Chevrolet (General Motors), Polaris
Retail & Commerce: GameStop, Rouses Market, Dutchie, Planet 13
Entertainment & Hospitality: AMC Theaters, Caesars Entertainment, Circa Resort & Casino, DraftKings
Financial & Business Services: Jack Henry, LendingUSA, Simmons Bank, MRI (Checkpoint ID), FedEx, Motorola
Government & Military: US Coast Guard Academy
As Skylabs noted in their listing, a driver’s license is effectively a lifetime identity record. Unlike a credit card that can be canceled and reissued with a new number in five minutes, changing a driver's license or passport number is difficult, and your physical attributes, date of birth, and full legal name remain fixed.
