How Much is Your Identity Worth on the Dark Web?

September 24, 2015 at 1:17 pm By

Your identity may be worth the world to you but it’s being shopped around for less on the Dark Web. According to new reports, your identity is being old for as little as $1.

“When it comes to PII, sales are conducted on a per-line basis of approximately $1. Each line of data contains a name, a full address, a date of birth, a Social Security number, and other personally identifiable information,” according to Charlie Osborne of CNET.

“If someone buys just a few lines, they can commit serious identity fraud. Trend Micro says this data used to go for $4 a line, but as so many data breaches have occurred in recent times, supply has increased and demand dwindled.”

So where does this information come from? Well if you were a victim of the Ashley Madison hack by Hacking Team or other larger and even smaller scaled hacks, there is a chance you personal information is being shopped around on the Dark Web (the Internet’s black market).

“Using theΒ Privacy Rights ClearinghouseΒ (PRC)’s Data Breaches database, Trend Micro found that hacking or malware was behind only 25 percent of data breach incidents from 2005 to April this year,” according to the report.

“Insiders are also a common reason for data loss, as well as the use of physical skimming devices and the loss or theft of devices including laptops, flash drives and physical files were also found to be the root cause of damaging data breaches.”

It’s scary to think that your information can be sold to anyone who wants it for cheap and while hacks continue to become more of a normality cyber security should be facing a pretty strong renaissance soon.

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