Stolen credit card data business becomes less profitable for cybercrooks

A research of Symantec Corp, security software maker, and Gartner Inc. showed that demand, prices, and supply of stolen credit cards, Social Security numbers and other private information remain stable.

The researching companies reported it was mainly because of the shock people are getting as the result of crisis. It is making people worried about their work and finances.

Security experts not involved in Symantec's study stated the prices for such goods could not go down any further, as the price is cheap already. For example, the price of stolen credit card number nowadays is only 6 cents to $30 per card depending on the quantity bought; while the price of access to hijacked e-mail accounts is 10 cents to $100, and so on.

Moreover, it is a lot harder to survive in this business nowadays. Firstly, due to anti-fraud measures, crooks must have a lot more details to sell the item as a package deal. Secondly, as Symantec suggests, crooks, who don't play by the rules, risk being locked out of future business, or being targeted with Internet attacks or possibly even physical violence.

According to Symantec the number of phishing Web sites has increased by 66 percent against the previous year. Gartner's estimated that more than 5 million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks from September 2007 to September 2008, which is a 40 percent increase over last year’s estimates However, it has been disclosed each victim was losing less money.

Symantec studied data from more than 200 million personal computers running its antivirus software, 200 million e-mail accounts that were involved in collecting spam only, and information from Symantec's large clients.

Source: The Associated Press