With the development of internet everyone got used to the news about hacking attacks of all different kinds: be it stealing of credit card numbers or hacking attacks on highly secured pentagon servers. However till the latest time we could calmly enjoy our online experience and don’t take this seriously: the chances our own accounts on various web-sites could be stolen were negligible as those hacker attacks were tiny comparing to the global web size. However recent trends suggest that the situation starting to change: only for the last months we’ve heard about big attacks on Gmail and Facebook. And here is the recent news from Kaspersky Laboratory, one of the world’s leading security SW developer: company released a report in which they discuss announcements about dozens of thousands Twitter accounts available for sale on hacker’s forums.
Arithmetic is simple:
- Twitter accounts go for 100-200 USD per 1‘000 depending on the number of followers
- Facebook accounts go for 25-45 USD per 1‘000 depending on the number of friends
- Gmail accounts were not openly sold – but Symantec estimates these accounts can go for 1-20 USD apiece
And this is not a myth: last month I personally lost my account in Russian biggest social network (which is actually a clone of FB) – as well as other 150K users.
There are no accurate estimations of the size of this market, but only the market of fake antiviruses, links to which were posted in majority of stolen Twitter accounts, was estimated by FBI to be over 150 mUSD in 2009.
And we can be sure with stakes this high the market of “social hacking” will grow double digits next years. So be aware of Trojans, Fishing-sites and never use simple passwords, threat can be much closer than you’ve ever thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment