E-commerce company Digital River exposed data belonging to almost 200,000 individuals after hackers executed a
The breach came to light only after a 19-year-old New York man allegedly tried to sell the purloined data for as much as $500,000, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported Friday. After Eric Porat made repeated attempts to persuade a company called Media Breakaway to buy the information, company officials alerted their counterparts at Digital River, the paper reported, citing court documents. A federal grand jury is investigating the matter with help from the FBI.

The data contained names, email addresses, websites, and unique user-identification numbers for 198,398 individuals. It was originally gathered by affiliated marketing companies using software offered by Digital Rivers subsidiary Direct Response Technologies and stored on password-protected servers.

It was stolen in late January using a

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