14 DAY TRIAL // Delving into the muck of the underground forums ran by crooks, a risk intelligence company found that the criminal activity regarding the trade of personal individual records has increased from a 13,000 daily average to a 650,000 one.
The data is provided by C6 Group and has been recorded with a focus on cities in the United Kingdom, over a period of two months, when researchers observed that the cyber crooks exchanged stolen emails, passwords, addresses, bank account numbers, passport numbers and dates of birth.
Cyber gangs across the world have been seen browsing the pages of the online locations that cannot be found through the regular search engines.
The price of the details varies from $0.09 / €0.07 to $50 / €38, depending on factors like the amount of information provided and the likelihood of successfully leveraging it, which is assessed based on a given score.
Darren Innes, CEO of the company, said that passwords and data relating to credit and debit cards is the most valuable on the markets they monitor.
These are stolen by the crooks through phishing scams as well as intrusion into computer systems of various organizations.
“Main culprits do seem to be south East Asia, Nigeria and former Soviet states, which makes catching the villain difficult,” says Innes; moreover, no special computer skills are required for carrying out the crime.
According to the company, C6 has a database with more than 421 million compromised identities, collected over four years, and by their information Manchester is the leader as far as the risk of having personal records compromised is concerned.
Living in this city poses a 10 times greater risk to have personal details stolen than if living in London.
The company has launched a website that allows individuals to check if their email address has fallen into the wrong hands. The query is compared to the C6 database.
C6 Group does not pay for the user emails in their collection, so it does not engage in trading with the cyber crooks.