Does crime pay? Online crims enjoy massive boom

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 08:08

Your IT - Home IT

No.2 on the list at 20% of the total amount of stolen info available online is “financial accounts”, which includes personal and company bank account details.

Stolen bank account information sells for between $10 and $1,000, and the average advertised stolen bank account balance is nearly $40,000 – if only my bank account also averaged this amount. 

Symantec says that over US $1.7 billion dollars was exposed in these stolen accounts, which is even readier money than credit from credit cards, especially because of the untraceable payments systems that are now offered to criminals which can transfer and launder money into cash in less than 15 minutes!!

What’s also a worry is that a lot of this criminal activity is being done in effectively public “underground forums”. As crime busting agencies clamp down on these more public forums, a lot more criminal activity heads towards private channels that are harder for law enforcement to penetrate, although clearly not impossible.

During the reporting period, Symantec says it “observed 69,130 distinct active advertisers and 44,321,095 total messages posted to underground forums”, with the “potential value of the total advertised goods for the top 10 most active advertisers [being] US $16.3 million for credit cards and US $2 million for bank accounts”, with the most active advertiser having $6.4 million worth of “goods” on sale!!

We already covered how online cybercrims are quite a diverse bunch, and servers hosting criminal activity are similarly spread across the globe. During the reported period, Symantec notes that “North America hosted the largest number of such servers, with 45 percent of the total; Europe/Middle East/Africa hosted 38 percent; followed by Asia/Pacific with 12 percent and Latin America with 5 percent”, however it also notes that “the geographical locations of underground economy servers are constantly changing to evade detection.”

Craig Scroggie of Symantec also went through more of the report in our phone conversation.

To no-one’s surprise, software piracy is also a big part of the underground economy, with software titles from operating systems to games and all in between that are popular sellers in stores being popular in pirate stores online. Games are the biggest type of pirated software at 49% of the pirate software total.

Botnets can be purchased for US $225, phishing scam hosting is $10, keystroke loggers cost $23 each, and you can get even buy your own site specific vulnerability at a major financial site – it will only cost you US $740!

Symantec’s new report also ties in with its “Data Loss Prevention” findings which show that over 70% of organisations have reported some form of data breach, be it by email, hacking, accidental loss or theft of laptops, USB sticks and more – and this is exactly the kind of commercial company data that is ending up for sale in the underground economy!

So, how you can you protect yourself, how can companies do the same – and what are some Australian statistics in Symantec’s report? Please read on to page 3, where you'll also learn of some remarkable security software...