Cyber World’s Black Market Flourishing on Stolen Credit Card Details

A recent research from security firm Kaspersky Lab states that the US credit cards are not as much worth as a person may think. During his malware analysis, Dmitry Bestuzhev, virus analyst, Kaspersky Lab, detected a website with pricing details for credit cards which had been swiped by cyber criminals, reported eWeek.com on August 20, 2009.

Bestuzhev stated that it is very difficult to tell the exact number of sites that are engaged in this business. However, he doubted that there might not be many as cyber criminals don't need to market their illegal business on a large scale. They are already well-familiar to their customers. He noted that, it is, in fact, a kind of club where cyber-criminals are familiar to each other in terms of online life.

The criminals also offer customer service to their clients and the technical support for the same is available both in English and German, he stated.

Majority of illegal credit card business conducted by cyber criminals is accomplished by means of specially created malware, mainly Trojans, as a result of which there is an upswing in the identity theft malware.

The research arm of Panda Security called PandaLabs revealed that 71% of 37,000 pieces of malicious codes being detected by it daily are trojans - most of them developed to steal credit card or bank details. Experts largely held economic recession responsible for the aforementioned surge in the recent months.

Luis Corrons, technical director, PandaLabs, stated that the recent surge is in line with organizations engaged in the illegal business of selling personal information of people, including eBay or PayPal accounts and credit card numbers, on the black market, reported eWeek.com on August 20, 2009. Besides this, the distribution of such sort of malware as well as the attack caused by them has been consistently surging via social networking sites.

Security experts in the meantime commented that in the cyber world, the black market economy remains always busy, particularly in this age of large scale data breaches, like the recent breaches at Hannaford Brothers and Heartland Payment Systems. Therefore, businesses need to be vigilant to evade such breaching incidents.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 9/3/2009