Today's malicious activities are most intended to steal people's information, no matter if we're talking about names, addresses, social security numbers or credit card details. Although most victims would be tempted to believe that hackers steal these details in order to compromise their computers and accounts, it seems like a different goal has reached the web: attacker set up online "supermarkets" in order to sell the stolen information. And there are a lot of consumers since hackers could perform an illegal activity without losing time for stealing the details.

Security firm Finjan warned that some websites are even selling "medical histories, information about the shipment of goods and corporate e-mail and pension details," according to BBC News.

"All this was found on one hacker's server and we believe it was information that was collected to be sold online. It is even being marketed on certain forums - 'We are selling this type of data and here is our price list'," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan, according to the same source.

In an era when data leaks occur every once in a while, such online supermarkets are likely to become pretty popular because attackers have the ability to launch their scams faster, without spending valuable time on stealing the info by themselves.

Back in November 2007, HMRC suffered a data loss which could affect approximately 25 million people due to the simple fact that two CDs sent from a department to another failed to reach their destination. Since then, the security measures have not become much more powerful so other important losses occur periodically. For instance, an employee who took his work laptop at home lost the notebook in which there was unencrypted information of several thousands of hospital patients.