You think crime doesn’t pay? It seems the Internet’s shadow economy is booming, and it’s making life more hazardous for anyone who relies on the web. And that’s just about all of us. The U.S. Treasury Department reports that cybercrime is now bigger than illegal drug trafficking. The feds put it at $105 billion a year and still growing.
A senior architect at IT security provider MessageLabs, Maksym Schipka, recently laid out how so much money can trade hands with just the viruses, spyware and trojans known as malware.
A new malware program sells for upward from $250, and for a mere $25 a month, you can get updates to ensure your new malware avoids detection. The unscrupulous buyer can then use a botnet – a network of infected computers belonging to innocent people – to spam millions of emails or send hundreds of thousands of trojan attacks or host a malicious website. Now the buyer can sit back and watch stolen data and identities roll in.
“A full identity sells for around $5,” Schipka says. “This includes full name and address, a passport or drivers-license scan, credit card numbers and bank account details. Credit card numbers sell for between two and 5 percent of the remaining credit balance on the cards in question.”
All in all, it’s a disturbing picture of an economy complete with division of labor, price competition and marketing, says Schipka’s report, all of it “accelerated to Internet speed and carried out online.”