Your Identity Is Worth Less Than $15

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "One of the more interesting tidbits in Symantec's Global Internet Threat Report (PDF, 105 pages) is the price sheet, which suggests that someone's 'full identity' is worth in the range of $1-$15. Your email password goes for $4-$30 and your bank account might fetch $10-$1000. With those prices, I wonder how often they pay more for the bank account than is actually in it? There's also an executive summary (PDF, 36 pages)."

Comments

Re:British ID card system

[Nursie]

That got me thinking - fingerprint checks, what if you fail and then say "but I cut my finger, it's still healing"?

And that got me thinking further, if they're needed for medical care, what happens to people who do cut their fingers?

Hmmm.

Where did the data come from?

[dave1791]

From TFA - "Bank accounts were the most commonly advertised item for sale on underground economy servers known to Symantec"

I'm curious as to where this data came from. Is it public record from court cases? Or does Symantec know more than the cops?

Re:British ID card system

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You'd have to seriously hurt yourself to disable this biometric:
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/casestudies/WWW2_casestudy_BTM.html

honeypot identities

[FudRucker]

what should be done is for banks to work together with law enforcement and create a bunch of fake identities with flags on them that when used it automatically notifies the police and sends all information to the police (photos, fingerprints & whatever else)...

Re:You're kidding, right?

[IBBoard]

It depends which account. I'm 18 months out of University, have finally got on to the housing ladder (which isn't easy in the UK with stupidly inflated house prices), and am supporting myself, my wife, and soon a baby as well. We've got more than that in one of our bank accounts. Granted, it isn't our Current Account (which I assume is what the Americans call their Checking Account because they write their cheques from it), but it's still an account with more money than that in.

But as someone else mentioned, they probably want them for laundering rather than emptying.

IE vs. Firefox statistics

[MongooseCN]

Check out page 3 of the executive summary. In Jan-Jun of 07, they found that 89% of web vulnerabilities were in ActiveX plugins in IE. 1% of vulnerabilities were in Mozilla extensions.

I think we have a clear winner here...

I smell profit !

[Ihlosi]

1. Open bank account.

2. Sell account information.

3. Close bank account.

Repeat.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[MMC Monster]

Should be an interesting poll:
How much money do you have in your (checking+savings) bank accounts?
1. 12 paychecks

Re:You're kidding, right?

[MMC Monster]

I meant to have the poll as:

How much money do you have in your (checking+savings) bank accounts?
1. Less than 1 paychecks
2. 1-2 paychecks
3. 3-5 paychecks
4. 6-12 paychecks
5. more than 12 paychecks
6. I'm an edge case, you insensitive clod.

This is great news, where do I sign up?

[petes_PoV]

So my email address is worth between $4 and $30. Excellent - I can afford to retire now.

If you know someone (hell, anyone) who pays this kinda ca$h, please let me know. With my own domain I can create email addresses indefintely, and at $30 each it's literally printing money.

Now, of course if the reality was that spammers pay a tiny fraction of a cent per address then it's less worth my while (but could still be worth knocking together a script for).

Which option strikes you as most likely? Yes, thought so.

In similar news, my password is worth money too? Really? My password is "chocolate" - that'll be another couple of $$ please (feel free to sell it on yourself, too).

Now, I'll just sit back and wait for all the SPAM^H^H^H^Hmoney to start rolling in. Hmmmm, I think I just burned out my irony circuits.

Re:I want to sell mine

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you are modded funny, but other people do this. They are basically used as money launderers to transfer funds through. Because of this, the price of your account is more than what you actually have in it. A few minutes with google is all it takes to find places to sell...

Credit Freeze

[Cancel-Or-Allow]

All the more reason to put a freeze on all of 3B reporting agencies. Since Nov 1 2007, everyone is entitled to it.
It cost $10 for each credit reporting agency and well worth it. Unlike LifeLock which only puts a fraud alert on your credit reports every 90 days (you could do this yourself for free), a freeze is exactly that. No accounts can be opened without a pin number given to you by the one of the 3 Bs. Each agency is different, some require 3 days to thaw your report, while others allow you to specify which creditors you want to allow and for how long.
One benefit is when car shopping you don't have the pressure from the sales people, it is very easy to walk out the dealership once they try to look up your credit score. They know they will not be selling you a car tonight, that you will have to come back later with a pin.

Re:Why would you?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Don't you remember just 8 years ago? Stocks are a gamble, nothing more. Like any other casino, you will eventually lose your cash.

My extra money goes into a 4% savings account. I can get it any time with 24 hours notice. Yeah, yeah, I can get 10% on the stock market. Sounds great, until it crashes - again or you get caught in a bad trade.

I tend to keep about a thousand in my chequing account. (Which works out to ... calculating ... a "loss" of about 50 cents a month compared to the parent putting his on the stock market.) My savings account generates about half the interest it would in the stock market (call it money market if you think it sounds better) but my money will never fail to generate. End of story. He can lose all of his money in a crash, scandal, bad report, low earnings, etc. Mine is insured against loss - even if the bank goes bankrupt, I get my money.

Now, the regular chequing account has basically no interest. That's typical, and you shouldn't have just that kind of account, because that's just silly.

I also pay $0 yearly in bank fees. $0. That's right, no monthly fees, no brokerage fees, no debit card fees, no interac fees, etc.

In the meantime, I put extra money onto my mortgage. That's the only place I owe money to. No student loans, no credit card debt, etc. I put 25% down on my house. I owe about 48% of the value of the house on a fixed rate mortgage.

I use some credit cards, but those are only for specific reasons, like 4.5% off gasoline or for tracking costs on vacation. Those are paid off monthly.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[socz]

Having worked as a teller for the 3rd largest bank in the world at the time, it's pretty surprising to see how little money people have.

I then moved up to merchant teller and saw that businesses weren't really that much better. People will usually brag about how much money they have, but what you really need to get out of them is the last 3 month average or the account average, and then you'll get to the meat of the problem.

Most people have very little, i would say $500 average is HIGH.

But if you sign up for my financial course, I can help you save thousands! :P