How your stolen personal data is sent to the dark web, and what hackers can do with it
- Some 6.5 billion online accounts have already been sold or leaked onto the dark web
- Hackers can link disparate bits of leaked data and passwords to extort victims
Michael Gazeley rattles off the number of online accounts that are leaked onto the dark web – a hidden corner of the web where that stolen data is traded.
“It’s 6.5 billion now,” the cybersecurity specialist says, standing in his office in Kowloon, Hong Kong, overlooking a control room where glowing computer screens display the pulse being taken of nefarious web activity. One dial acts as an algorithm-generated odometer for internet threat levels, while a pulsing world map shows regions from which cyberattacks and spam campaigns are launched.
“That [6.5 billion] could mean that everyone with a device has been hacked twice over. That’s mind-boggling stuff,” says Gazeley, managing director of Network Box, which sells cybersecurity services to businesses around the world.
Threats to cybersecurity play out daily on the screens before Gazeley’s eyes, and in the back room supercomputers that trawl the ever growing volume of account information leaked onto the dark web.
That growing threat is borne out by the numbers. Globally, the volume of cyberattacks doubled between 2015 and 2018, according to year-on-year analysis from the LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ ThreatMetrix global cybercrime report, which gleans its data from billions of global transactions.
