It’s being reported that that between 2016 and 2017, there was a 182% increase in raw identity records discovered by intelligence threat company 4IQ. “Raw” identity records refer to social security numbers and other pieces of PII associated with children, which fraudsters can purchase to amass unchecked credit on dark web forums. Tim Helming, Director of Product Management at DomainTools commented below.
Tim Helming, Director of Product Management at DomainTools:
“This kind of activity on the dark web is an indication of how sophisticated and industrialized the burgeoning fraud industry facilitated by the dark web has become. While governments have had some success in the past year in shutting down some of the larger drug markets such as Alpha Bay, marketplaces offering personal information harvested from data breaches are still thriving. Data pertaining to children is a particularly ingenious and sinister method of fraud, including the creation of so-called ‘synthetic identities,’ which would potentially allow a criminal years of uninterrupted fraud until the child is old enough to open a bank account. These kind of issues are a stark reminder of the importance of tackling dark web marketplaces, as well as protecting consumers from data breaches, which provide a healthy pipeline for cybercrime such as this for years to come.”
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