What prices tell us about risk
1 December 2008
The Economist, reporting research by Symantec, has an interesting chart of the most common goods and services offered by cybercriminals.
You can use the prices on the right of the chart as a sort of risk indicator: if a criminal steals your bank account details, you can expect to lose the amount another criminal is willing to pay (plus the value of the second criminal’s time) to get those details. Keep in mind that these values represent the average (mean) amounts victims will lose and criminals will gain – in reality, some victims will lose a lot more and some a lot less.
Most interesting feature of the chart: email passwords sell for more than full identities. If you think your email password isn’t very valuable, you should know that cybercriminals think otherwise!
Read more about economics of security,offline security,passwords
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[…] written before that the prices criminals are willing to pay to get your account details are good magnitude of risk indicator…. In this case, if the value of each Facebook account is less than 5 cents, criminal buyers must not […]