How much stolen data costs?

23rd September 2007

Symantec Corporation has published its data on the prices for certain information taken from cyber-criminals. In particular, according to InfoWorld with reference to published by Symantec "report on network threats", for the first half of 2007, the highest valued data are those of stolen bank accounts: on average, about $ 400. Data on credit cards go for 0,5-5 dollars, passwords to mail boxes are estimated in the range of 1 to 350 dollars per one, and "collections" of postal addresses are purchased by spammers at $2-4 per megabyte.
As the director of European security department William Beer pointed out, everything points to the commercialization of cybercrimes, where entire groups of hackers are involved in research, development and sale of malware to other criminals. Besides, Symantec notices the quality growth of such software, the development of which are organized by well-funded international gangs as well.
Hackers steal personal information, performing more pointed attacks on private computers, preceded by collecting information about potential victims on all sorts of social resources, including Myspace and Facebook. With enough data on the victims, The Hacker has a greater chance to attract he (she) to some harmful site or make him run an attachment containing the malicious code, which is sent in in the form of a personal message, thus, seeming different than just spam.
Symantec also notes increased "multi-stage" attacks, in which computers of users are infected by small program gradually downloading viruses, trojans etcâ€¦ The number of spam, also graphics spam, has fallen down. Symantec connects it with improved spam-filters.