Kaspersky Lab detects black market of digital personalities

SINGAPORE, Apr 9 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Kaspersky Lab has discovered a black market of user digital data, including payment data, Sergei Lozhkin, the company’s senior antivirus expert, said on Tuesday at the Security Analyst Summit.

A digital personality comprises up to 100 parameters or digital footprints, which users leave when making payments on devices and in browsers, including data on a screen, an operating system, a time zone, authentication information, and data in payment systems, Lozhkin said.

The notion also comprises the information gathered on the basis of expanded analytics, like cookies and digital habits of users.

Equipped with such information, perpetrators can easily mislead anti-fraud tools and enter accounts of real users without any break-in and carry out transactions that will raise no doubt in banks.

Kaspersky Lab detected in February a store, called Genesis, dealing in digital personalities. Prices varied from U.S. $5 to $200. Victims were mainly citizens of the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe.

The experts also found browser Tenebris with an embedded generator of digital footprints, Lozhkin said.

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