Data leak
National General / Allstate Insurance Quoting Portal Data Breach
Primary Source βIncident Details
National General (later acquired by Allstate) suffered two sequential data breaches via its online auto insurance quoting portals. First breach (2020): exposed driver’s licence numbers of ~12,000 individuals including 9,100 New Yorkers. Despite discovering the breach, National General failed to notify impacted consumers or fully remediate the underlying vulnerability. Second breach (2021): a larger attack exploited the same unpatched flaw, exposing 187,000+ consumers including 155,000 New Yorkers’ driver’s licence numbers. New York AG Letitia James sued National General and Allstate on March 10, 2025, seeking financial penalties and security improvements. Separate settlement: NY AG secured $975,000 from another auto insurer. Notable for the failure-to-notify after the first breach enabling the larger second breach. Insurance sector; application security failure.
Technical Details
- Initial Attack Vector
- Application vulnerability in online quoting websites that displayed full driver's licence numbers in plain text with minimal user input; scraped by automated attackers
Timeline
- 2020-01-01 Breach occurred
- 2025-03-10 Publicly disclosed