Almost 4.5 lakh Indian debit,credit card records are being sold on dark net for $9 a piece

The records of nearly half a million payment cards of Indian banks are being sold for $9 apiece on the Joker’s Stash, one of the most popular underground cardshops

The records of nearly half a million payment cards of Indian banks are being sold for $9 apiece on the Joker’s Stash, one of the most popular underground cardshops (Pixabay)

It's perhaps time to get very worried. According to Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB, records of nearly 4.5 lakh payment cards of Indian banks are being sold for $9 a piece on Joker's Stash. Joker's Stash is one of the most popular underground cardshops on dark net.

Group-IB has detected a database containing over 460,000 payment card records uploaded on Joker's Stash on February 5. Of these, over 98% were from some of the biggest Indian banks.

This is the second major upload of payment records related to Indian cardholders that has been registered by Group-IB in the past several months. The first one was reported last October.

The underground market value of this database is estimated to be more than $4.2 million.

The source of where this batch of records came from remains unknown though Group-IB has said that they immediately informed the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) about the sale of these payment records.

The dark net database has card numbers, expiration dates, CVV/CVC codes and additional information like the cardholders' full name, as well as their emails, phone numbers and addresses, Group-IB's security researchers said.

"Such type of data is likely to have been compromised online -- with the use of phishing, malware, or JS-sniffers - while in the previous case, we dealt with card dumps (the information contained in the card magnetic stripe), which can be stolen through the compromise of offline POS (point of sale) terminals, for example," the company said.

Earlier, on October 28 last year, the Group-IB Threat Intelligence team detected a huge database that had more than 1.3 million credit and debit card records of mostly Indian banks' customers uploaded to Joker's Stash.

Group-IB experts determined that the underground market value of the October database was estimated at more than $130 million.

(With agency inputs)