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

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?

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]

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.