Nowadays, those interested can sieve some of the sensitive to very sensitive information from the dark web and that includes banking and email credentials of individuals and businesses. And according to a report compiled and released by Crossword Cybersecurity, information related to over 2.2 million students and staff from UK’s 100 top universities is now available on the dark web. And concernedly about 54% of the information belongs to 24 leading UK Universities representing Russell Group.
If the figures are dissected further, most of the info belongs to over 2.2 million students studying in UK of which 680,000 belongs to international students and the rest belongs to natives, apart from an additional 234,000 staff members.
When a representative from the company contacted a source on the dark web, the data of 1000 students was available for a purchase just for a meager £30 and sometimes the price might go as low as £6 and might to a high of £80. The price volatility depends on the type of information and the data timeliness.
So, educational institutions should start monitoring their data storage practices and watch for any leaks. Also implementing multi-factor authentication makes sense as protecting PII of staff and students from prying eyes makes complete sense.
Security analysts suggest that hackers are always behind information that can fetch them great monetary benefits and so it cannot be restricted to a specific sector, and can spread to other sec-tors such as manufacturing, automotive, finance and such.
