Another advantage of credit cards..

LONDON (Reuters) - Prices charged by cybercriminals selling hacked bank and credit card details have fallen sharply as the volume of data on offer has soared, forcing them to look elsewhere to boost profit margins, a new report says.*

Yes, folks, you read that right. If you want to buy a stolen credit card and PIN, now's the time because the price has never been better. A Platinum card -- guaranteed to be "fresh" and work when you use it -- can be had for $20.

This is because hackers have been so successful at planting Trojans on your machines, poisoning websites, and getting people to provide their identities through phishing (spam) e-mails, and using their botnets, that they simply have too much product.

We aren't just losing the war on cyber-crime, we're not even fighting one.

So.. since stolen credit cards are now a dime-a-dozen, what is the "shadow economy" organized cyber-criminal to peddle? "New types of stolen data are now commanding a premium, such as patient healthcare information that can be used for insurance fraud or to illicitly acquire and sell medicines.

Other premium data includes business information, company personnel files and intercepted commercial emails."

Yikes.

These kinds of news stories, and reports, never seem to make make the front page or headline the news. Billions are being stolen from us, every year, the problem is growing, and we don't seem to care.

And the media doesn't like finding the "guilty party" in this kind of story because the truly guilty are us.
* From a security perspective, the Internet is completely broken and needs to be scrapped and rebuilt. Nobody knows how to "fix" the old structure. The headline, Tech Experts Are Baffled isn't very reassuring to the public, and that might lead to the dreaded "consumer confidence" failure.

* We --the common everyday Internet surfer-- can't be bothered with securing our machines, or even learning enough of that "tech stuff" to realize our PC's are not convenient toys.
"Why get a new Vista or Mac computer? My Windows 98 machine lets me get on the Internet and play BlackJack.." How many times have I heard that???
Some experts say that 75% of all the computers are infected with malware. Wonder why?
What does this story's headline look like?

* We --the common everyday Internet surfer-- KEEP clicking on e-mails that promise us free iPods, or tell us that there's 750,000 Pounds Sterling waiting for us to simply pick it up.
What does this story's headline look like?

Awww, I'm getting depressed, angry, and.. frustrated. We deserve to have our identities stolen, and we can't blame the smart people for taking it from us when it's this easy.

Yes, a lot of this is not our fault. The Tech Industry continues to sell us crappy products, and would rather be first to market than to check the security of their technology. I wrote about this here, How the Tech Industry is Failing You.

To read the whole news story which triggered today's rant, click here.

To visit Finjan (one of the article's sources) and look at their quarterly analysis of the state of Web security and cyber-crime, click here.

I apologize. I didn't mean to bring you down. But if you think you can take more, why not read about how the credit card companies are putting unsecured transmitters into your cards now, so a criminal can pick your pocket wirelessly! Credit Card 2.0.

Don't you just love the folly of Man?

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix