With traversing advancement in technology, stealing digital data & swindling the innocent users has become cakewalk for cyber criminals. Hence, it is crucial for the users to stay one step ahead of the pernicious dodges of scammers & practice digital data protection solutions.

You can imagine the loss caused to a user after he loses all his digital life, including banking credentials, credit card details & social media accounts.

A recent digital data study revealed that a user’s entire digital life can be sold by cyber criminals for a less than 50 US Dollars.

Insight in to the Recent Digital Data Theft

Many of us might have heard of or fallen dupe to cyber crimes like identity or data theft, however comparatively a few people realize the value of the data stolen.

Scientists from a Russian cyber security firm, Kaspersky Lab conducted a research on research on Cyber crime & found that a user’s identity may not worth a lot in dollars; however it serves as a crucial asset to criminals in many ways.

The research unveiled cyber criminals’ hankering for stealing digital data from renowned internet services like social media accounts & via gaining illicit remote access to gaming websites.

The major reason behind digital data theft is careless attitude of users towards the security of their systems or applications installed. The stolen data may have a restrained resale value; however it can be used by cyber criminals or cause massive complications for the innocent victim. Potential hurdles include losing money & reputation, being pursued for a debt that someone else has induced in victim’s name.

What All Digital data is stolen By Cyber Criminals

Kaspersky Lab conducted a thorough investigation of the ‘Dark Web’ markets to detect the worth of personal digital data & ways in which the data is used by cyber criminals.

Note: ‘Dark web’ or ‘Dark Net’ is an encoded portion of internet, which is not indexed by search engines. Dark Web networks use the internet; however accessing these networks need a specific software, configuration & authorization.

Upon research it was found that cyber criminals are capable of selling away a user’s entire digital life for around 50 US dollars. The stolen data includes social media accounts, banking details & credentials, remote access to desktops or servers, data from popular services like Uber, Netflix, Spotify, and data from gaming websites, dating apps & porn websites, which might include credit card information.

Methods Used By Cyber Criminals

Spear Phishing Campaigns & exploiting a web-oriented vulnerability in an application’s software are the most prominent way used by scammers to steal digital data. Following a successful attack, a password dump for the hacked services is received at the scammer’s end, which contains a combination of user’s e-mails & passwords.

Surprisingly, criminals provide their buyers a lifetime warranty while selling the data, so in case one hacked account stops working, the buyer will be provided a new account without any charge.

How to Protect Digital Data

David Jacoby, Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab said that data hacking is a considerable threat to all & this applies to both individual & societal level as stolen digital data finances scores of social evils. Further he added that such cyber security threats can be prevented by using reputed Cyber security software & being acquainted with the amount of data that users give away for free- precisely by being publicly available on social media profiles, or to certain organizations.

Users can avoid cyber security threats by practicing some digital data protection techniques & these techniques should become an integral part of user’s digital life.

Before clicking on any link, users must always confirm if the link address & sender’s e-mail are genuine. Robust security software will warn the users in case they attempt to visit any phishing page.

Users must never use the same password for several accounts or web services in order to avoid data leakage & harm to digital identities.

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