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Underground Economy Booming
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2008-11-24
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There's good news and bad news regarding Symantic's underground Internet economy report, released today. The good news is that the bad guys have steely eyes upon them at all times. The bad news is that the bad guys' business is booming.
 | | Underground Economy Booming |  |
It would seem that economies of scale have grown to the point that wholesale access to your and many others' bank accounts is relatively cheap. Between June 2007 and July 2008, close to 70,000 cybercriminals advertised their services in underground online forums.
Need a good hosting kit for a phishing scam? Average price is $10, but as cheap as $2 or as high as $80, with guaranteed uptime and virtual hosts. Daily, weekly, and monthly hosting services available for as little as a dollar a day.
Need a good botnet? You can rent one, upgrade your old one, or buy a new one for an average price of $225. You can pay for it all with a stolen credit card number, which can cost as little as 10 cents, or as much as $25 for a card with an average limit of $4,000.
Credit cards are the most popular offerings, offered in bulk with discounts or free bonus numbers with larger orders. The second most popular purchase is access to someone's bank account, running between $10 and $1,000, but with an average account balance of $40,000.
In the report, Symantec's Security Technology and Response (STAR) organization estimated the potential worth of all the credit cards advertised was $5.3 billion and would sell for an estimated total worth of $276 million last year. Potential combined bank account worth was tallied to be about $1.7 billion.
Over the 12 month period Symantec monitored 44,752 unique samples of sensitive information publicly posted on underground economy servers, a small percentage of the millions of messages posted with tags like "100% successful," "fast," or "legit."
Where are all these underground economy servers located? Symantec said about close to half (45 percent) were in North America, but, perhaps thanks to heavy law enforcement monitoring, North American fraudsters are scattered out, obtaining information from acquaintances. They are far less organized and efficient than their Russian and Eastern European counterparts.
Locating them isn't so easy, though. Symantec notes one case where financial accounts were cashed out to untraceable locations in under 15 minutes.
"As evidenced by the Report on the Underground Economy, today's cybercriminals are thriving off of information they are gathering without permission from consumers and businesses," said Stephen Trilling, vice president, Symantec Security Technology and Response. "As these individuals and groups continue to devise new tools and techniques to defraud legitimate users around the globe, protection and mitigation against such attacks must become an international priority."
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SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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