Welcome to The Optery Dispatch — a newsletter delivering the latest insights on threat intelligence and proactive cybersecurity strategy. In Issue #2, published June 26, 2025, we cover: Phishing’s Role in Breaches: Behind the Numbers of Verizon’s 2025 DBIR When the extent of phishing’s hidden impact is factored in, it is likely the initial source of compromiseContinue reading "Phishing, OSINT Defense, and Physical Data Broker Risks"

On March 20, 2024 Brian Krebs of the security blog Krebs on Security published an investigative report entitled “The Not-so-True People-Search Network from China.” The article sheds light on a concerning trend in the people-search industry, revealing a network of US-focused sites based in China that operate under fabricated identities. As the report notes, “It appearsContinue reading "A Network of US-Focused People-Search Sites in China, Operating Under Fake Identities"

Use this interactive chart to explore the Top 50 Biggest Data Brokers (ranked by number of pages indexed in Google).

What People Search Sites are really good at is stoking people’s psychology. They have all of these devices that have been built up over decades through trial and error that are are designed to get people to take the next step, to garner more curiosity, to get them to complete a form or to get them to hand over their credit card.

Finding out that data brokers sell personal information of yours that you didn’t offer to them to begin with can be disturbing, and the fact that it’s gone unregulated for so long makes it a little bit scarier as far as the information that you can actually find out about other people now.

What data brokers would do is go out and scrape the web, and also gather public records databases for free. They could license data from companies like LexisNexis or Acxiom or Epsilon, and then they could just publish all of that information to the Web. They could put ads on the website, and then they would have millions of pages of content indexed in Google.

Lawrence Gentilello, Optery CEO and Founder, and Heather Smith, Optery Data Broker Operations Manager discuss who are the data brokers and people search sites posting and selling your personal information online.