The business of stolen accounts in the Dark Web: 854 credential sets of 42 OTTs at $ 8.71 each

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The Dark Web is still home to businesses such as the sale of stolen credentials to access online services. But to what extent does this type of trade come? The security company Irdeto has been investigating it, and in a report published this month it reveals that it has found up to 854 sets of credentials of up to 42 OTT services for sale in the depths of the network.

OTTs are audio, video and other content transmission services, and among these 42 services there are some top-level services such as HBO, Netflix or Hulu. The report also reveals that all these sets of credentials are being sold by 69 different merchants, using a total of up to 15 online stores.

The report also points out that the average price of each stolen credential is around 8.71 dollars , although some sellers create packs in which, for a higher price, they sell access passwords for several different services.

The report also sheds light on the traffic that some pages receive that allow their visitors to access the streaming content of different services, accounting for an average of 74 million visits per month and 21 million unique visitors. The countries where these pages are accessed the most are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Canada.

It is clear that companies like Irdeto are interested in bringing this type of reports based on theft and purchase of online credentials, as they are dedicated to selling security solutions to help protect these services. However, it is interesting to know some of the figures of the black market of the network.

• first step is to prevent your credentials from being stolen

All this trade is based on the theft of personal credentials to access these platforms and then put them on sale in the Dark Web. Therefore, it depends both on the massive leaks that tend to occur from time to time and on the facilities that we give users to steal our accounts.

A recommended measure is to set a strong password to make it as difficult as possible to access our accounts. Nor should we stop being alert to any anomalous behavior that we see within the services, such as the appearance of certain movies that we have not seen or music that we do not listen to. In addition, experts also often advise to use password managers .

Services like Netflix also usually carry out a monitoring of their credentials, and in the past they have taken measures such as requesting the resetting of their users' passwords. However, it is also recomended to change the password monthly.