A hacker has put thousands of French identity cards and passports for sale on the Internet. Official administrative documents which would come from hotels and which could be used for scams by theft.
You can find everything on the Dark Web. Because even if this is not its primary vocation, this hidden Internet is a very popular means for hackers, pirates and crooks of all kinds to exchange information, tools, resources but also data for illicit purposes. And we regularly see dishonest proposals, like a black market. So the Zataz Watch Service spotted a few days ago that a pirate had put up for sale some 3,000 identity documents for French nationals for the modest sum of 600 dollars. Copies of official documents (identity cards and passports), with double-sided photos including all associated details (number, name, address, etc.) and allowing the identity of victims to be easily usurped. According to Damien Bancal, founder of Zataz and expert in cybersecurity for more than thirty years, these parts could come from hotels whose data would have been hacked.
As this specialist has pointed out for years, hotel establishments and tourism organizations represent prime targets for hackers. Thus, in November 2021, the information of some 10 million customers of the Thai group Centara Hotels & Resorts, which owns more than 70 luxury hotels and resorts in many countries, was sold on the Dark Web: it concerned people from all over the world. having stayed in its establishments between 2003 and 2021, including those having made reservations for the month of December. In a similar vein, hackers had recovered the license plates of vehicles that had passed through the parking lots of Shanghai International Tourism and Resorts …
For now, it is not known whether the file of stolen identity documents has found a taker. Nor how they will be used. But one can imagine that the acquirer will use it for various scams, in particular via phishing campaigns. This sale is in addition to many other recent cases, in particular that concerning the confidential data of 39 million French people (see our article), also revealed by Zataz. Or the one discovered a few days ago, where we learn that sensitive information from 67 million French user accounts (email addresses and passwords) are in nature, looking for buyers …