Millions of cookies containing personal info on Irish people for sale on dark web

Study analysed cookies offered for sale on forums and marketplaces

Over 57m cookies containing information from Irish people were leaked on to the dark web, according to new research. Picture: iStock

Over 57m cookies containing information from Irish people were leaked on to the dark web, according to new research.

The study analysed over 93.7 billion cookies offered for sale on dark web forums and messaging app Telegram marketplaces. Ireland ranked 117th out of 253 countries surveyed by internet security company NordVPN, with 4.7 million active cookies found. Cookies are data files stored on computers or mobile devices each time you visit a website or an app.

“Personal information such as name, email address, city, password, and address was frequently exposed,” said a NordVPN spokesperson.

In total, 94bn cookies were found leaked on the dark web by the research, with the highest concentration of cookies came from Brazil, India, Indonesia, the US, and Vietnam.

According to NordVPN, 38 types of malware were used to steal these cookies, with Redline collecting more than 41.6bn. RedLine Stealer is a malicious software that uses a file-grabber to collect sensitive data from browsers, apps, and cryptocurrency wallets.

Over 4.5bn cookies were from Google, another 1.33bn from YouTube, over 1.1bn from Microsoft, and about 1bn from Bing.

The most common cookie categories were assigned ID (18bn) and session ID (1.2bn), both of which are critical for maintaining sessions and identifying users on websites.

The research was gathered in collaboration with threat exposure management platform Nordstellar.