Symantec sheds light on cybercrime economy

24 Nov 2008 14:31

In a report, Symantec has revealed prices for cyberattack tools and bank-account details, and identified counterfeit-software trends

According to Symantec, a keystroke logger can be bought for $23 (£15), while $10 will pay for someone to host your phishing scam.

Having a botnet at your fingertips will cost you $225, and a tool that exploits a vulnerability on a banking site costs, on average, $740, and runs as high as $3,000, according to Symantec's Report on the Internet Underground Economy, released on Monday.

Symantec researchers observed discussions among cybercriminals on IRC channels and forums on the internet between 1 July, 2007, and 30 June, 2008, and were able to piece together a menu of malicious code, as well as dig up detailed information on the exchange of highly prized financial information.

For example, credit-card information accounted for more than 30 percent of all of the types of goods and services sold by cybercriminals. Bank-account details were the most commonly advertised item for sale on the underground-economy servers monitored by Symantec, with prices ranging from $10 to $1,000, depending on the balance and location of the account.

If the sellers were able to sell everything they were offering, the resulting total would amount to more than $275m. That figure represents just the sales amount. Factoring in the emptying of victims' accounts and maxing out credit cards, the potential worth of the credit-card information and bank details for sale would be $7bn, Symantec estimated in its report.

The report also studied trends in the trading of counterfeit software, with researchers monitoring sales between July and September of this year. The most frequently counterfeited software was found to be desktop games, followed by utility applications and then multimedia software, such as photo- and HTML-editing tools.

Most of the people uploading counterfeit software to be sold were in the US, the report found. The US was also found to be home to most of the underground-economy servers (41 percent), followed by Romania (13 percent).

Cybercriminals in Russia and Eastern Europe appear to be better organised than their counterparts in the US, who are "often made up of acquaintances who have met in online forums and/or IRC channels", according to the report.

Story URL: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39561658,00.htm