A surge in the volume of stolen data has caused the price of hacked bank and credit card details to fall sharply, Reuters reports. According to researchers for Finjan, a Web security firm, account details with PIN codes that once sold for $100 or more might now only bring in $10 to $20. Taking its place are new types of stolen data, such as patient healthcare information that can be used to commit insurance fraud or to acquire prescription medication to sell on the black market. Other data commanding a high price now includes business information, company personnel files, and intercepted commercial emails.

Lest you envision some lonely hacker working out of his basement, the Finjan report describes a Mafia-type cybercrime hierarchy where top-level bosses run an underground business leaving the actual attacks to underlings, who get paid according to the rate of infections achieved and the country of origin of the infected computers. Stolen data is then resold along with a 48-hour guarantee to supply the buyer new details if those originally bought were rejected by payment systems as stolen cards.

With the increased volume of stolen data and additional cost to financial institutions, Finjan says it's only a matter of time before customers are fully responsible for any security breaches and might even mandate that customers install some sort of security software on their desktop. While Maximum PC readers tend to be ahead of the curve when it comes to security, would you support such a move if it were to happen?

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Software, Security, hackers, stolen, web, bank data

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