This Online black marketplace is selling your digital identity

Beware of the ever-evolving scary side of the Dark Web.

Cybersecurity has become an ever more important issue for more than 4 billion netizens. As more of us spend an increasing amount of time online, safeguarding ones’ digital identity from the nefarious players has to take priority. The involvement of Nation-states in this activity has gotten the attention of lawmakers.

Last July the American Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed that the Russian government hacked the U.S. power grid. Citing national security concerns a new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was created in November 2018, to prevent U.S infrastructure from cyber & physical attacks.

The virtual world of the World Wide Web is divided into three categories — Dark web is a subset of the Deep Web & the hub of mostly illegal activities (infographic below). Despite repeated crackdowns by the law enforcing authorities on this digital wild west, the online black market has continued to flourish. A new online marketplace called Richlogs was added to it in April of this year.

Since its emergence, Richlogs has been selling stolen “digital fingerprints” to the interested parties which include IP address, OS information, time zone, user behavior…