The dark web has once again shown to be a risky place for personal information when an alleged Pakistani perpetrator posted about 5000 Indian residents' identifying documents there. This comprises details from your PAN, driver's license, passport, and Aadhaar card.
The information is also thought to have been disclosed on open forums by the same person. This makes it incredibly simple for anyone, even those without any technical knowledge, to gain free access to vital information by using Google Search alone.
Who are threat actors
Threat actors frequently use the dark web to illegally obtain or buy concealed data. These transactions, which are frequently done through secret channels, represent a serious risk of personal identity theft.
According to reports, a threat intelligence researcher discovered an alleged "Pakistani" forum on the dark web where a group of alleged threat actors communicates over Telegram's private channels. Saumay Srivastava concealed his identity and pretended to be a member of the group.
The majority of the group's conversations were in Urdu, and the channel's profile included images of the Pakistani flag. He observed the chats for days before discovering that "they claim to have different data dumps of Indian government organizations, including Indian Railways, and several business bodies as well."
Shortly after that, a threat actor uploaded an approximately 5.5 GB dump link of Aadhaar and PAN cards. It included scanned copies of 1,059 Aadhar and PAN cards.
More Aadhaar, PAN, DL, and passport details leaked
According to media reports, further investigation revealed that the hacked data was being dumped on open forums by the allegedly identical threat actor. An additional 4,000 Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, passports, and licenses were publicly leaked on a website. The suspected threat actor even leaked a large number of Netflix account credentials, including passwords, over this hacker's forum on the surface web.
What is the dark web?
The World Wide Web is much larger than the online websites we visit every day. The deep web resides beneath this "surface" internet, and the dark web is hidden inside it. Darkweb is an overlay of unreachable networks on the Internet that frequently use a specially customized communication protocol and can only be accessed with particular software, configurations, or authorization.
This information can only be accessed via specialized configurations or browsers like the Tor browser, where user anonymity is unrestricted, and is purposefully hidden or encrypted, not indexed by conventional search engines. All of the content on it is a subsection of the deep web that is not indexed by traditional search engines.
