Slashdot Mirror
Glut In Stolen Identities Forces Price Cut
CowboyRobot writes "The price of a stolen identity has dropped as much as 37 percent in the cybercrime underground: to $25 for a U.S. identity, and $40 for an overseas identity. For $300 or less, you can acquire credentials for a bank account with a balance of $70,000 to $150,000, and $400 is all it takes to get a rival or targeted business knocked offline with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire attack. Meanwhile, ID theft and bank account credentials are getting cheaper because there is just so much inventory (a.k.a. stolen personal information) out there. Bots are cheap, too: 1,000 bots go for $20, and 15,000, for $250."
$300 get me a bank account with $70k to $150k in it!?! Count me in!
Why is this junk even on slashdot?
Seriously! If you even suspect that the machine you're working from has ben compromised by malware, CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD to the accounts you've used via a known clean computer. Then proceed to nuke the drive from orbit and reload the OS and apps. Botnets are known sources of dropping key loggers and harvesting user data to a central database.
Life is not for the lazy.
because it's important that your health history and comprehensive financials be digitized ASAP by incompetent bureaucrats.
"Outdated business models" is code for "I don't like paying for things, but want them anyway"
Purchasing $150,000 for $400 (vary currency as necessary) would seem to be a loophole that would quickly undermine the world economy. Perhaps "price" of a stolen identity isn't a proper measure of "value".
So, if I'm to follow the reasoning of this article, if we all use weak passwords , the market gets flooded and they all go out of buisness?
SWEET
password:password, here I come!
Identity theft should be a capital crime.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'd like to cut out the middle man and sell my Identity.
40 bucks buys a few cases of beer - just sayin...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Credit cards have velocity limits to minimize exposure. Max amount per time period, max number of withdrawals per time period, etc. Hence, the risk isn't worth the reward.
Here, take my identity, please!
You get to assume a recent bankruptcy, a child support obligation, a spotty employment record, a sub-500 credit score, three maxed-out credit cards, a beater car, and a psychotic ex-wife.
Clean arrest record and a good tech education, though. Maybe you could apply to a NSA contractor.
Reminds me of the time my brother had his wallet stolen. When I asked him if he cancelled his credit card, he said "Hell no! The thieves are spending less than my wife usually does".
It's time to get the government out of the identity theft business, as it is clearly wildly distorting the market.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Potato.
It should be easy enough for someone here to harvest phonebook or other records from 70 years ago, refresh and randomize birth dates, and begin to flood the identity theft market with fake personalities and random government identity records. That would greatly increase the amount of work for identity thieves, who actually benefit from passwords (which provide evidence it's bonafide identity they are stealing). For years I've promoted "camouflage" rather than invisibility. I now think the reason it has not taken off (disappearance of AntiPhorm?) is that it's equally a threat to Google, Bing, and advertising-based search engines. We can be less careful of our "identity needles" if we construct bigger "digital haystacks".
See article on digital haystacks and cookie camouflage http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2010/09/simpler-ideas-cookie-camouflage-digital.html
Oh, by the way, I'm not really Retroworks. I find I get higher mods if I steal a /. identity rather than to submit AC
Gently reply
Once the NSA drops the ball they'll be under a buck.
This is great news, I forgot my banking password. Now I can get it back at bargain basement prices!
When Bitcoin was new, you could successfully mine bitcoins using your CPU. But the parameters on Bitcoin keep making the amount of computation higher, and these days the CPUs have been left in the dust, GPU-based miners are getting passé, and it takes ASICs to really keep up. Part of that's competitive speed, and part of it's the cost of electricity, which as a botnet herder you don't actually care about, but you've got to have a mining client that can run on the GPU without being noticed, so it can't run if the user is doing graphics-intensive GPU stuff. Harder to hide that without being detected.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lockheed Martin's supplier web portals only worked with IE 8 until the last couple months. Mind you, that doesn't mean everything actually works with anything else...
Posting as AC because this is not widespread knowledge.