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Forget Phishing Just Buy Personal Info
Iago writes "If you need information about a person in Moscow, just go to the market and buy it. The Globe and Mail reports that along with the usual pirated software, cd's etc. you can find out information such as the bank records of your competitors, motor vehicle information and tax returns. The question is, how much of this information is being sold in other countries, perhaps in a more sophisticated manner?"
They've been doing this for years in other countries. What most people don't realise is that most of these stories you hear about personal information/security breaches (Lexis Nexis, etc etc etc) usually goes to thugs like this.
These thugs sell this information to people in the black market. This isn't new stuff neither, the news just seems to hover on this and "identity theft" a lot recently. It's been happening since the 80's.
A massive flood of fake information would dilute the value of stolen i.d. right?
Sell a man a phish he can scam for a day, but teach him how to phish and he can scam for himself for a lifetime.
In every major Russian city you can obtain almost for free a database with phone numbers(including cell), addresses, car registry and pasports for all citizens of this city.
Even more, it's hard to find a PC in my own city that doesn't have a "Megapolice" database, which contains all above information accessible throught a single easy-to-use interface.
A few years ago in Israel a CDROM started circulating with information about more-or-less the entire population. The database was probably leaked from the Ministry of Interior. It was originally used by a private investigations firm but a copy leaked and started circulating freely.
IMHO, once it's out there it's everyone's civil duty to get a copy, just to level the playing field.