A new Night Lion Security and Data Viper report provides an inside look at the lucrative economy of hacked consumer gaming accounts, where cybercriminals are earning upwards of $40,000 per week in profits. 

According to the report, in 2019 alone, there were more than 4 billion breached records. In 2020 so far, there is an estimated additional 2 billion breached records that have gone up for sale on various darkweb markets. Hacking groups like Gnostic Players and Shiny Hunters account for a vast majority of data breaches involving stolen user data, and are indirectly responsible for fueling an entire criminal economy of stolen accounts. Thanks to their efforts, databases of consumer information are stolen and sold to private buyers, only to be repurposed and used to hack individual consumer accounts. These hacked databases are then sliced up and resold, only to provide ammunition for credential stuffing attacks designed to identify valid accounts across different consumer products. These stolen accounts are then packaged and resold across a number of sub-ecosystems, the most profitable being the market for hacked gaming accounts.