Dark Web Prices Drop, More Personal Information Available
Privacy Affairs, a registered publication focusing on data privacy and cybersecurity, researched the Dark Web market and found that the market prices have dropped significantly.
The report discovered that the Dark Web market grew in size and diversity between February 2021 and June 2022. Buyers are accessing increasingly large numbers of products, including personal information.
Users access the Dark Web with special software that allows them and website operators to remain anonymous or untraceable. Because of its ability to evade government censorship, many have used the Dark Web for illegal activity.
Based on the Privacy Affairs’ report, nearly 2 million vendors are selling stolen, hacked or bogus data and documents on the Dark Web's 32 data product sites. In 2022, the Dark Web Price Index revealed that hackers were collecting large amounts of data and selling it cheaply. As a result, prices had dropped significantly — but the profit margins still remain very high for those who could buy and sell the information in bulk.
Many items have become significantly cheaper compared to 2021: Price of PayPal account details dropped from USD120 to USD20 while hacked credit cards with CVV details saw prices reduced from USD35 to USD15. Coinbase accounts can now be purchased at a reduced price of USD120, down from their original USD610 in 2021.
The report also revealed how much personal data was being sold, contributing to a high sales volume. There are more vendors selling information — more than 9,000 active vendors — and they sell more personal data than ever before: fake IDs, credit cards, personal information like driver's licenses, and documents such as passports were available for sale.
Most common items include cloned credit cards and cardholder data, hacked social media accounts, email databases including 10 million U.S.-based email addresses for only USD120, forged documents in both scan and physical forms, malware, and DDOS attacks.
However, in the last period, new items have appeared on Dark Web markets, such as hacked accounts of cryptocurrency users and hackers offering to sell access to Uber or Netflix profiles.
The report showed that the ever-increasing amount of data available for purchase on the Dark Web had created a bulk sales mentality among cybercrooks, who see users' data as a valuable commodity. It costs them very little to steal identity or otherwise exploit personal information — and they'll take what is freely given without thinking twice about it.
