NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Waylon Wong.

And I'm Cooper Katz McKim, a producer on the show.

Okay, Waylon, we've talked about the dark web before.

Yes, it's part of the internet where people go to do all kinds of illegal business.

So it sounds scary, but you know, I wanted to actually see what it looks like.

Is it all just like a black background with red text kind of thing?

So I checked in with Miquelais, Campobaso, a cybersecurity expert in Italy, and he actually

took me there, specifically

to this ransomware site.

What they do is that they have this kind of blog where they post notices for their victims

with a countdown of, if you don't pay us by the end of the countdown, we are going to release

data.

And what he showed me were these caches of data, of high schools, of hospitals, of entire cities,

that have lost their data because they didn't pay some ransom.

This is one example of how data is breached.

There's also malware, deep fake fraud, the big corporate breaches you hear about in the news,

and all of it is happening for the purpose of extracting value from your information.

It's a very flourishing market. It works. It just works.

This week on The Indicator, we're bringing you a special series on the involving business of crime.

When it comes to data breaches, that evolution has been supercharged.

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