A massive amount of credit card information is sold on the Dark Web, mainly that of US cardholders—but the numbers aren't always robbed through a data breach.
If you've never seen a scheming charge on your credit card statement, consider yourself fortunate. It's no mystery that card details are bought and sold on the Dark Web, but the scope and ease of this commerce might be more alarming than you guessed. A new report from NordVPN puts it in viewpoint.
Nord didn't go to a Tor server and download a ton of illegal databases full of credit card information(we're taking it on faith). But it did associate with some anonymous cybersecurity investigators who were evaluating these databases—one, in certain, had received 4.5 million credit card records. But that data was edited from what Nord worked with. Nord then calculated a risk index for every country on the plane. The closer your state is to a 1 on the index, the more likely your card is to be available already on the Deep Web.
It's manageable to see that the United States is way up there, with 1.6 million card numerals for sale—the most of any country. Nord went further and broke it down by state.
The numbers are quite high in the well-populated states of California, Texas, Florida, and New York. The more cards you have, the higher your risk, naturally.