To entice us to purchase, we were shown an extract of 114,000 emails and passwords showing Hotmail, Libero, Alice, Yahoo, Cnr or some Italian municipalities email addresses resulting from fraud, hacker actions or phishing activities
by Riccardo Bastianello
updated at 11:42 21 October 2021
© ANNETTE RIEDL / DPA-ZENTRALBILD / DPA PICTURE-ALLIANCE - Hacker AGI - The theft of data, with a simultaneous request for a ransom, yesterday's SIAE is just the latest in a long series. Last August, just to mention the most famous cases, malicious hackers (it should not be forgotten that there are also "good" hackers) had violated the archives of the Lazio Region, sending the anti-Covid vaccination campaign into a tailspin for a few days. But we don't count the hundreds of thousands of companies or individuals who see their data hacked every day. A recent research by Crif sees Italy in absolute 6 place among the countries most affected with a boom in personal data theft which in 2020 recorded a + 56.7%. According to CybergOn, in 2021 the damage caused by Ransomware alone could cost 20 billion dollars worldwide.
But where does all this stolen data go? AGI has entered some Telegram groups where the databases thus obtained can be purchased. One such group had 45,000 members at the end of September when it closed after it was discovered that the materials for sale were stolen financial data, personal documents and credit card information. A couple of weeks after its reopening it already has more than seven thousand members. We pretended to be interested in buying databases of Italian emails and at a price of 80 dollars (to be paid strictly anonymously through the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Tether or Ict) we were offered an archive of one million emails with relative passwords. Not only. To entice us to purchase, we were shown an extract of 114,000 emails and passwords showing Hotmail, Libero, Alice, Yahoo, Cnr or some Italian municipalities email addresses resulting from fraud, hacker actions or phishing activities. "Data is the new oil - explains Pierguido Iezzi, IT security expert and CEO of Swascan - we used to see these trades in restricted environments such as the dark web or deep web but this" black market "has become increasingly gray, almost now white and within everyone's reach ". In fact, next to Telegram there are several sites (which obviously we will not mention) where you can find accounts and related passwords resulting from data breaches on Facebook (on one site we found the data of 533 million users), in antivirus software or in trading companies in America. "The other real step that has not yet been addressed today is how these cyber crimes can have a terrorist impact - continued Iezzi - certainly the goal of these cyber criminals is to maximize their profit so it is normal for them to make the "spoils" of their crimes are increasingly accessible to all. Data theft will soon become a practice because we are talking about ever larger and richer volumes of data ”. “Today anyone can do a cyber attack without leaving home, simply by consulting Google. The tools are there and are easily accessible to everyone (during the interview we were shown lists with at least a dozen free services that anyone could use to carry out computer fraud, ed) - he concluded - the fact is that the " dark force "has lost its color, it is no longer dark and you can find it in the clear, playing on features that anyone can use for purposes that are not entirely transparent".
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