4M Payment Card Details Found On Sale On The Internet - 30k Belong To Taiwan

An Average Taiwanese Hacked Payment Card Costs Around $20 On The Dark Web

LONDON, Dec. 7, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- New research by NordVPN has analyzed 4M payment cards that were found for sale on the dark web and belonged to citizens of 140 countries. The average price of a Taiwanese card was 19 dollars and 60 cents.

29,447 payment cards found hacked belonged to Taiwanese. The most affected county was the US as 1,561,739 out of 4,481,379 payment cards found for sale belonged to Americans.

More than a half (23,295) of all the discovered payment cards coming from Taiwan were Visa, followed by Mastercard (4,098) and American Express (2,048).

"Since 2014, we have been seeing a constant growth in payment card fraud around the world. We decided to look into how much a payment card costs on the dark web and why  there's a booming underground black market for them," says Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN. "And the answer is that hackers can easily make a lot of money. Even if a card costs only $10 on average, a hacker can make 40M$ by selling a single database, like the one that we analyzed."

How did those records appear on the dark web? Brute-forcing explained

"Increasingly, the card numbers sold on the dark web are brute-forced. Brute-forcing is a bit like guessing. Think of a computer trying to guess your password. First it tries 000000, then 000001, then 000002, and so on until it gets it right. Being a computer, it can make thousands of guesses a second,"  Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN explains.

There is little users can do to protect themselves from this threat, short of abstaining from card use entirely. The most important thing is to stay vigilant.

"Review your monthly statement for suspicious activity and respond quickly and seriously to any notice from your bank that your card may have been used in an unauthorized manner. Another recommendation is to have a separate bank account for different purposes and only keep small amounts of money on the one your payment cards are connected to. Some banks also offer temporary virtual cards you can use if you don't feel safe while shopping online," Marijus Briedis recommends.