According to NordVPN, one of the world’s largest VPN service providers, around 5 million people globally have had their data stolen and sold on the bot market to date, with 600,000 of them from India, making it the worst affected country, Reuters has reported.

Bot markets are used by hackers to sell data stolen from victims’ devices with bot malware.

A study by NordVPN of Lithuania’s Nord Security said the stolen data included user logins, cookies, digital fingerprints, screenshots and other information, with the average price for the digital identity of a person pegged at Rs 490.

NordVPN tracked data from the past four years since the bot market launched in 2018.

As per the report, NordVPN’s study looked into three major bot markets – the Genesis market, the Russian Market, and 2Easy and found stolen logins including those from Google, Microsoft and Facebook accounts.

“What makes bot markets different from other dark web markets is that they are able to get large amounts of data about one person in one place,” said Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN.

“And after the bot is sold, they guarantee the buyer that the victim’s information will be updated as long as their device is infected by the bot,” Briedis added.

Researchers of NordVPN found 667 million cookies, 81,000 digital fingerprints, 538,000 auto-fill forms, numerous device screenshots, and webcam snaps in their study.

Earlier, a week after the ransomware attack on AIIMS, Delhi; the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) faced around 6,000 hacking attempts within 24 hours on November 30.

Earlier this year, Indian cybersecurity regulations were tightened with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) requiring tech companies to report data breaches within six hours of noticing such incidents and to retain IT and communication logs for six months.

(With inputs from Reuters)