Ten Australians have been arrested and charged as part of an international police sting targeting a website selling stolen account logins.
The invite-only website, of which about 70,000 people had access to, offered login credentials, browsing history, autofill form data and other sensitive data taken from hacked devices.
The number of Australian victims of the website – called Genesis Market – are still being calculated, but 36,000 compromised Australian devices were found to be available for sale on the site, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said.
“This is now the new normal for our communities, with the cyber impacts having real world impacts on people in their homes. It’s the modern burglary,” AFP Assistant Commissioner Scott Lee said.
Lee said the hackers were using malware to target people’s computers and other devices.
“Whether it’s your phone, your laptop, tablet, (the malware) then extracts your browser history, any cookies you may have on your device, any passwords that might relate to your bank accounts, your social media accounts, those types of things,” Lee said.
“Once those are then extracted, they are placed on the marketplace for sale.
“People can purchase and seek to use those credentials to compromise people and gain access to their bank accounts, or other services they can then use for fraud purposes.”
Lee said there was no link between Genesis Market and recent large-scale, data-hacking incidents in Australia involving companies such as Optus, Medibank and Latitude.
At the time it was taken offline, Genesis Market offered access to more than 1.5 million compromised computers – each containing information for dozens of accounts, including logins for companies such a Netflix and Amazon.
One of the administrators of the website was believed to have been operating out of Russia, while another was located in Asia, according to the FBI.
A Victorian man, who police will allege is the most prolific purchaser of compromised information in Australia, was among the ten arrested by the AFP and state detectives locally.
The Box Hill man, 31, is accused of spending more than A$56,500 purchasing information from the website.
The Dutch Police have developed a portal to help determine if your personal details have been compromised.
