More than 150 million driver's license scans were up for purchase on the dark web, highlighting the risk you take every time you hand over your physical ID.

Recently, a dark web platform known as Nexus claimed to be selling more than 153 million driver's license scans. In addition, there were more than 10 million ID cards, 3 million travel documents and international IDs, and over 579,000 medical cards. KrebsOnSecurity was alerted to the site on August 31 and found the figure plausible; a blank search returned 11.5 million pages of results.

Most scans were U.S. licenses, but over one million Canadian licenses were included. It also featured commercial driver's licenses and Common Access Cards. KrebsOnSecurity found that Pete Hegseth, United States Secretary of War, had his license made available. Nexus claimed to have extracted data for over a year from a major identity verification company; many found in databases had rented a car through Hertz.

Nexus has since been removed, but the data hasn't vanished. Digital IDs in Apple Wallet could reduce data collection, but adoption is limited. Many states don't support it, and most businesses lack compatible readers.