Immersion in the Dark Web: where does the data go?

Month does not pass, so that some large company is not hacked. JPMorgan Chase & Co , Target, Morgan Stanley , Sony , Anthem are examples of the largest organizations whose data has been stolen over the past few months. In 2014, in the United States, data was stolen 783 times, and since 2005 there have been 5029 hacks - attackers have received 675 million records.

The security experts at Bitglass decided to experiment and find out where the stolen data goes.



The Dark Web service is a black market. It is available through Tor, it sells hacker tools, information, drugs and weapons. And on it you can download anonymous files for free, which Bitglass experts used in their experiment.
')
An Excel file with 1568 fake records of nonexistent company companions was placed on one of The Dark Web file hosting sites. The file was equipped with a small “surprise” - a special watermark that helps specialists determine where they opened the document - geographical location, IP address and type of device. Experts noted that this watermark cannot be deleted, and when copying data from this file to another, it also marks a copy.

A few days later, the team received information that fake records were downloaded in 5 countries on 2 continents and viewed 200 times. On day 12, the file received 1080 clicks and spread to 22 countries on 5 continents.

By the end of the experiment, a fake employee document traveled to North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Africa. Countries that are often associated with cybercrime activities, including Russia, China and Brazil, were the most frequent access points for this data.

The results of the experiment in PDF .