More than 2 billion pieces of sensitive data were leaked onto the dark web in Brazil last year, which made the country lead in the survey by NordVPN, a global cybersecurity company. The most common personal information exposed on hacker domains were name, email, city, password, and home address. According to NordVPN, around 30% of the leaked information was active. The survey also showed that the sites with the largest volume of leaked data were Google (2.5 billion), YouTube (692 million), Microsoft, and Bing (more than 500 million).
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Cookies
Technically, this information is contained in so-called cookies, text files that a website sends to a user’s browser with data about the profile and browsing behavior on the pages. This causes the browser to provide users with more content that may appeal to them. This data can also contain sensitive information such as name and location and can be used by hackers.
Developing Countries
In addition to Brazil, most of the leaks took place in India, Indonesia, and the United States.
A Kaspersky survey released in 2023 revealed that, after the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercriminals became more selective and prioritized targets with the greatest potential for payback, such as companies and government entities in developing countries, like Brazil.
Increase in Scams
It was also during the pandemic that criminals, limited by health restrictions, began to focus more and more on scams, especially those that use data leaked online. The number of scams in Brazil has more than quadrupled in the last five years: in 2022, 1,819,409 cases of this type of crime were registered, 326% more than in 2018, when there were 426,799 records. It was an average of 151,600 cases per month, almost 5,000 per day. The increase was 38.5% in the last two years, since in 2021 there were 1,312,964 cases. The data is from the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook 2023, a survey conducted by the Brazilian Public Security Forum (FBSP) and released on Thursday (20/07).
The country recorded an even more significant increase in crimes committed totally in the virtual environment. In 2021, there were 120,470 cases reported; in 2022, there were 200,322 cases, an increase of 66.2%.
Vulnerable Cyber-Defense Infrastructure
In recent years, some major cyberattacks on important systems, mainly government systems, with millions of Brazilian citizens’ data stored, caught the attention of society and showed that the country’s cyber-defense infrastructure could be quite vulnerable.
For example, on 10 December 2021, a cyber-attack took down the Ministry of Health’s systems, which were offline for more than a month.
The main system, called the National Health Data Network, was affected. It brings together all the information registered by states and municipalities in the Unified Health System (SUS).
In addition to this episode, there was also the invasion of the National Justice Council system, which allowed hacker Walter Delgatti to insert fake documents, which included, in addition to a fake arrest warrant against Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, 11 release orders that benefited supporters of the former President Jair Bolsonaro.
Protecting Yourself
Many security measures can be followed to reduce exposition to risks. Regarding the theft of cookies, users can, for instance, delete cookies, reducing the amount of data available.
Source: Folha de São Paulo.
