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High-profile cyberattacks, like the one JPMorgan Chase revealed thatpotentially compromised 76 million households, would logically lead one to think that bank and credit card data are a hacker's primary target.
Turns out that's the least of it. The easy availability of stolen data created a thriving underground marketplace for purloined information, and some cybercriminals are even going up the value chain and selling things like they're own hacking services.
Credit card data—so widely and often stolen that there's actually an abundance of it—can sell for as little as pennies. The going rate for a social security number isn't much higher: Only about $1.
Medical records—rarer and much more data-rich—can go for $50 or more. (All of this pricing data comes from security firm RSA.)
The marketplace for all this stolen data exists on the so-called "dark web"— which is buried within the "deep web." The "deep web," also known as the "hidden web," is the part of the World Wide Web that is not indexed by normal search engines like Google and is only accessible via special software.
The software commonly used to access the "deep web" is called Tor, which stands for The Onion Router. This Internet portal basically anonymizes the user's IP address making them almost impossible to trace.
"It is pure capitalism. It is driven by the purest laws of supply and demand. As long as there is a demand someone is going to step in on the supply side. It's the same economics you see in the markets," said Christopher Budd, Trend Micro's threat communications manager. Goods are often exchanged on these forums using virtual currency, and thus the transactions are harder to trace.
Credit card data is so cheap because there's so much of it, a result of the high number of breaches, said Daniel Cohen, the head of business development for RSA's Online Threats Managed Services Group.
Documents that provide more information about a person's identity usually cost more. Thus the reason medical records—which can contain your entire identity including your address, social security number, financial information, the names of family members and perhaps even your insurance policy numbers—have become so valuable, Cohen said.
