Panda warns of cyber black market

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The cyber black market is growing and anyone can get online to take part in illicit activities, a report has found.

There are more than 50 dedicated online stores where web users can buy data, ranging from credit card details to logins and passwords, Panda Security has discovered.

Credit card details can be bought for as little as £1.25 per card. For those who want credit line or bank balance details, the price can go up to £50 for smaller bank balances and above £430 for accounts with a guaranteed balance of £51,000 or more.

Cyber criminals have also been seen flogging card cloning machines for between £125 and £625, as well as fake ATM machines from around £2,200.

To rent a botnet, to user for a spamming campaign for instance, users can expect to pay between £9.50 and £12.50

Tools have also been made available for anyone who wants to set up a fake online store to sell rogueware to unsuspecting users.

Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, said getting involved in the black market was as easy as looking for the right terms on Google and finding the right site.

Although he couldn’t put a figure on how much the cyber black market was worth, he said it would be “many millions.”

“When I started researching these kinds of things, you could find some places, but just a few. Now there area lot of them, so it has grown a lot,” Corrons told IT PRO.

“As long as it remains so easy to do, it will continue to grow at the same rate or even higher.”

Corrons said he does not expect to see big changes in the evolution in the market, as the criminals are making enough money with the system as it is.

Earlier this week, Symantec warned of the proliferation of attack kits, which are making it simple for anyone to get involved in illicit online activities.

Even those with very limited technical capabilities, it seems, can now become a cyber criminal.

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