14 DAY TRIAL // There was a time when a hacker could steal your bank info and sell it for as much as $100. But according to Finjan, a company that specializes in providing Internet gateway solutions, that price has gone down to $10-$20 because the offer has soared while the demand remained relatively the same.
Finjan has recently released its Q2 web security trend report and, according to it, e-crime economy is constantly evolving. Back in the day hackers would do it just for the recognition, but nowadays e-crime "has become a major shadow economy ruled by business rules and logic that closely mimics the legitimate business world."
Hackers have turned to other ways of making a profit, such as stealing health care, employee and business info. A patient's health care info can later be used by a wrongdoer either for insurance fraud or to obtain pharmaceutical products. Commercial e-mail messages also fetch a nice price on the black market.
"With the transition of cybercrime from amateur hacker attacks to highly professional cybercrime business models, we see that the organizational structure of cybercriminals reflects this trend. Individual hackers operating independently or groups of hackers with common goals have been replaced by hierarchical cybercrime organizations were [sic] each cybercriminal has his own well-defined role and reward system", says the Q2 report.
According to Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO with Finjan Israel, the competition in the hacking world is fierce. It is in many ways similar to the legitimate business world; in order to attract clients and thus make a profit, the hackers must first prove that they can deliver high quality goods so that a customer will come back again and again.
"So far the banks are not mandating the end-user to have some sort of security on their desktop. They're taking the risk, better to say they're paying the risk, when your account has been compromised," says Yuval Ben-Itzhak as cited by Reuters.