The darknet has proven itself useful as a perfect location to host a marketplace of information hackers steal and want to sell while keeping their identities protected. Due to the nature of these sites, hackers can easily find individuals who would be interested in buying such kind of information. As soon as cryptocurrencies were available to the public, they were quickly adopted as a favored choice of payment for illegal transactions, due to their ability to hide the identities of their users. According to one cybersecurity company, it was estimated in 2016 that banking credentials would sell for 1% to 5% of the balance of the account, medical records for around $50 per record, and $12 for a U.S. credit card with its information. In the case where this information is not being sold, it is a regular occurrence for it be posted on the deep web, mainly paste sites such as Pastebin or Github.
It has become common for organizations to pay these hackers to protect themselves and/or their customers to secure the information being sold. According to a report by a prominent, the amount of breaches has gone down from 2016 to 2017, but the size of the data gathered from the breaches has increased. Furthermore, the average cost for a company to retrieve each stolen record was $141 in 2017.




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