We’re living in a digitally connected time. There’s a breach in the news every other day. It’s no surprise that your personal information could be floating around the dark web, especially if you’ve reused passwords. So, we were curious...would people be willing pay to get their sensitive information off the dark web? How much would they pay? What would people rather do than create strong passwords?
We conducted a global study of 2,000 people with OnePoll that explored the value placed on private information available online.
Results show that 1 in 4 (25 percent) people would be willing to buy back their private information from the black market. When we asked people who’ve previously experienced a hack, that number jumped to nearly 50 percent!
How much are people willing to pay?
The average person revealed they’d be willing to spend nearly $30,000 to buy back their stolen information on the black market. Topping the list of things people value most when it comes to personal information are debit card numbers. According to our results, people would part ways with nearly $4,000 to retrieve their stolen debit card number –– $3,968.18 to be exact.
When it comes to passwords, people are also willing to part ways with a lot of money to get their information back. The average person would be willing to shell out $3,808.28 to retrieve their email password from a hacker, while online banking passwords were a little less valuable, but still important to people who were willing to part ways with $3,212.79.
Would you rather?
Having your personal information stolen can be a tough pill to swallow. We asked respondents some of the mundane things they’d rather do or endure than having their personal info stolen. We found that 39 percent revealed they’d rather sit in traffic, while another 30 percent of people are happy to do their taxes if that would avoid having their personal information hacked or stolen.
Beyond what people would rather do than have their information stolen is what they’d be willing to give up. It turns out, 35 percent of people would much rather give up alcohol, another 33 percent of the people surveyed revealed they’d happily forgo reality TV and another 1/3 would give up coffee and chocolate if that meant they’d keep their personal information safe and protected from a potential breach.
Keeping you safe in a world full of breaches
Passwords play a huge part in your overall security, but we continue to see people neglect basic best practices. They’re leaving themselves vulnerable by using weak, easy to crack passwords and then using those same passwords across their other online accounts. To ensure you’re accounts and sensitive info are safe, use long, complex, ideally completely random passwords, that are unique to every service and website.
It’s unrealistic to expect people to remember dozens of strong passwords. This is where LastPass comes to help. LastPass makes it very easy to create unique passwords for each online account, store them in a secure vault, and automatically fill them the next time you log in to these websites. LastPass can also store other sensitive personal data like addresses, credit cards, passport information, etc. So not only are you protecting your passwords, but really anything that you don’t want to get in the hands of a hacker. Plus, with LastPass, your passwords and sensitive information are synced across all devices, so you can access them from all your mobile devices and laptops, at work or from home.
