Hands full of credit cards for peanuts!

How much money would you require to buy credit card numbers or bank account details of stolen credit cards? Confused and Surprised? You can buy one and that too for as low as Rs 16, thanks to the underground online markets. Quite surprisingly, sensitive information such as the above is up for grabs on the internet, where forums are created to expedite these transactions discreetly.

These forums are run on special underground economy servers which are mobilized by unethical elements to advertise and deal in the stolen information. The list of stolen information features secretive items like social security numbers, credit verification values, personal identification numbers, user accounts, email address list etc. They even have pre-defined tariffs to access different types of information. For instance, e-mail passwords can be accessed for as little as Rs 162, full identities can cost anywhere between Rs 40.5 to Rs.608.40. So are these miscreants traceable? Perhaps not. The reason for their non traceable nature can be attributed to their nomadic nature, wherein they hop, skip and jump from one public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to another which allows dissemination of messages on an individual basis, and as soon as they are tracked to any particular IRC, they immediately shut shop and change their location.

Now you might be wondering, how does the transaction take place in such an exchange. Well, to pacify your curiosity, let me mention their simple 1-2-3 approach of this discreet marketing. Firstly, these miscreants advertise their goods on IRC, followed by establishing a direct contact with the prospective buyers to strike a deal and finalize the payment options. Finally, after repeated deliberation, both the buyer as well as the seller comes to a mutually agreed payment option that can either be executed through online currency exchange or in the form of an exchange of goods.

In the latest Symantec Internet Security threat report released by the US-based IT security major, Symantec Corporation revealed that during the second half of 2007, bank account credentials, including account numbers, authentication information, were the most advertised entity on underground economy servers, making up to 22 per cent of all goods advertised. While it is true that tracing thefts on the web is a near-impossible task, it is perhaps a point to ponder upon that when will measures be taken to curb this black-marketing, if you will, of personal information. If you ask me, it's really high time for such activities to be taken action against the instigators of these activities.