Target Hackers Have More Data Than They Can Sell

itwbennett writes "The hackers who stole millions of credit card numbers from Target customers are probably 'laying low knowing that everyone is looking for them,' says Alex Holden, who runs cybercrime consultancy Hold Security. But it's also likely that they can't sell them: 'You can imagine that having a lot of stolen credit cards will not net the hackers, say $35 per card for all 40 million,' said Holden. 'Even if the hackers are willing to sell cards for $1 a card, no one will buy the stolen goods in these amounts.'"

Comments

Stupid People

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always reduce things. They can sell a smaller subsets.

Re:Stupid People

[PPH]

But the buyers know (roughly) how many cards are available. The media has seen to that. So they know its a buyers' market.

Seeing that

[Kardos]

next to everybody's card has been stolen, is it time for everybody to get a new card? It'll make the stolen database worthless, as well as all other databases of stolen credit cards...

De Beers and OPEC

[tepples]

And now you understand the dilemma of De Beers and OPEC, which have more diamonds and oil than they know what to do with and trickle them to the market to keep the price up.

Re:Probably not worth a dollar...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah but those are debit cards not credit cards. If stuff happens with your wife's debit cards it's her money that's gone and she has to try to get it back from the bank/merchant.

Whereas if they were credit cards, if stuff happens it's the bank/merchant's money that's gone and they'd have to try to get the money from her or their insurer or eat the loss.

See the difference in urgency? ;)

Paranoid much?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of awful bank / credit card company do you have that charges you a replacement fee? I literally replaced my debit card and credit card without any fee, and my debit card was even replaced with a temporary one free of charge.

Furthermore, most of them would likely prefer to send out a card rather than have to deal with claims of account fraud, which costs them money to investigate as well as to eventually replace.

I'm no fan of the banks, but this is ridiculous.

Re:Uh, it's not 40 million...

[cusco]

Our banks are run by people who play "executive musical chairs". If something will save the bank a million dollars over the next ten years, but nothing for the first three years, it won't get implemented because the executives will have rotated out to another company by the time the savings could affect their quarterly bonuses. Chip and pin would cost the banks money to implement, so it won't happen until you get a set of executives who can see further than the next board meeting.