Hackers are making a killing selling stolen Fortnite accounts on the dark web

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The dark web is the wild west of the internet. It is a place where you can find just about anything from credit card numbers, drugs, login credentials, and a whole mess of other illegal stuff. According to a report prepared by Night Lion Security, stolen video game logins is a massive business on the dark web, generating approximately $1 billion every year. 

How did they do it?

According to the researchers who worked on this report, hackers use automated cracking software to probe up to 500 Fortnite accounts per second. That’s 30,000 accounts every minute or 1.8 million accounts being tested for weaknesses every hour. 

According to Epic Games, there are over 350 million Fortnite users presently. To probe each of those accounts, the hacker’s software needed only 194.5 hours. There is no confirmation whether the hackers got to probe every account or stopped at some point. 

Indeed, there are already thousands of accounts on sale on the dark web. Most Fortnite accounts sell between $200 and $250, whereas those with the best skins sell for thousands of dollars. There are even reports that hackers can’t even catch up with the demand for specific accounts. 

Epic Games responded by releasing a statement saying that selling and buying stolen Fortnite accounts is a violation of their services. They even introduced machine learning, IP reputation, captcha, and all sorts of methods to protect their users against this. But naturally, hackers always seem to be a step ahead of them and regularly find ways to bypass their security measures. 

According to some unconfirmed rumors, some hackers are banking $25,000 per week. That’s well over $1.2 million every year. That’s a pretty decent living.

Why your Fortnite account might be vulnerable? 

The reason why hackers are so successful hacking Fortnite accounts is from old user data. Some of the software hackers utilize takes advantage of old data breaches and old test accounts using that data.

Facebook, Adobe, Yahoo, Canva, eBay, Zynga, just to name a few, are companies that experienced data breaches. Hundreds of millions of login data and passwords were stolen during those breaches. As it turned out, millions of Fortnite users had an account with either of those services when those breaches occurred. 

Now one might ask, but how is that relevant? What that has to do with Fortnite? Those are all different companies. Well, as it turned out, many Fortnite users used the same passwords they had back in the days when those companies lost their data. Astonishingly, many people repeatedly used their old passwords!

Change your password frequently. Furthermore, don’t use the same password everywhere and include two-step verification whenever possible. That’s how you protect your account and minimize the chances of your account being hacked.

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Deep Ballu