The expert spoke about the schemes of cybercriminals

Only 8-12% of information losses are due to company employees. More than 85% of data leaks from companies are not the fault of employees, but the deliberate work of intruders attacking businesses. Alexander Bykov, head of security services at Nubes cloud provider, told Izvestia about how cybercriminals work.

"Of course, this is more dangerous for financial sector companies working with clients' money. As for the gradation of information attractive to hackers by type of leaks, according to our information, customer and transaction data leaks are in the first place (more than 40%, including in banks under loan and deposit agreements), followed by personal data (over 32%), technical documentation (over 15%), financial documentation (about 6%)," he said.

Scammers are already selling on the black market not only full names, e-mail, credit histories and addresses of citizens, but also entire companies (mostly small ones) to conduct illegal operations. According to the Solar AURA service, there are at least 8 thousand such organizations, and 1.5 thousand of them became known in 2024.

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"If these are cyber groups, then usually this data ends up for sale on the darknet. If they are "hacktivists", then often the data just ends up in the public domain. On the darknet, many transactions on such databases are conducted through cryptocurrencies. But not all of them," he said.

The value of the stolen information depends on the completeness and relevance of the database. The larger the list of data (full name, phone number, card numbers, etc.) and the fresher the database, the more valuable it will be. The reliability of the data is also of great importance, very often they try to pass off compilations of old leaks as new "drains".

"The average cost of one leaked database usually does not exceed $1,000. This forces the attackers to trade quite actively and try to sell as much as possible," the expert said.

Earlier, on April 3, it was reported that in 2024, 58% of Russian companies faced unplanned downtime of their IT systems and equipment or data loss. At the same time, losses from even one hour of downtime of an enterprise company can cost tens of millions of rubles. This is stated in a study by the IT integrator Telecom Exchange.