How valuable is the user's personal data?

Personal information obtained by users after theft or unauthorized data access becomes a commodity and is bustling on Dark Web (underground web), a huge market of stolen data and information.

This business model is becoming more and more exciting and out of control. According to the data analysis company Experian, there are many types of information with prices ranging from 1 to 2,000 USD, depending on many factors such as time, reliability of the database .

Personal information worth the money?

Specifically, social security numbers are sold on the underground web for $ 1, while credit or debit cards cost about $ 5-110, passports (US) are $ 1,000-2,000. And social networking data like Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Twitter are priced at 5, 1, 7 and 2 USD respectively. The highest value ever sold at 'black market' belongs to Paypal when the account information is sold by hackers for 247 USD.

Darkweb is the "focal market" of personal information. (Photo: Experian)

Rick McElroy, security strategist at security company Carbon Black, said personal information is becoming cheaper because more and more records are leaking. Last year, 5.3 billion records were released due to accidents and 2.6 billion records leaked by hackers.

Price of personal information according to Experian's statistics.(Photo: Experian.)

How is personal information traded?

There are 3 main ways to buy and sell personal information:

1. Buy data in a one-time format, such as social security numbers.
2. Buy bulk data, packages of the same type of information.
3. Purchase packet data (including many types of information combined), this is a "premium" product.

According to statistics of Javelin Group in 2017, the level of fraud committed based on illegal data access has increased nearly 400% in the last 4 years.

What users have to do to protect their personal information

To protect themselves, users should:

1. Maintain strong passwords.
2. Do not share personal information on social networks unless necessary.
3. Use antivirus software.

See more:

1. 8 ways to protect simple digital personal information
2. 50 million Facebook accounts are stolen, this is the biggest leak of information in social network history
3. 10 things should not be shared on Facebook
4. Want to know what surprise Facebook holds about you, visit here