LifeLock

It’s all a matter of supply and demand. Pickpockets and small-time hackers were once the only source for a meager supply of stolen credit cards and credit card data, and prices were correspondingly high; in the mid-1970s, buyers routinely paid as much as $20 for a single credit card record.

But that was then. Now the cyber-world black market is awash with stolen “dumps,” the data from the magnetic strips on the back of bank and credit cards. Ironically, when Albert Gonzalez hijacked the computers at Hannaford Brothers, Heartland Payment Systems and other corporations, and stole account information on 170-million and credit cards, he flooded the market, and effectively drove down the value of the stolen data.

When the VerizonBusiness 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report came out earlier this year, their analysts had found prices to be as low as $.50 per credit card account.

Virus analysts at Kaspersky Lab examine malware found on the Internet or their customers’ servers, and sometimes they can work their way back through a maze of redirects to find the thieves’ lair. This week, Dmitry Bestuzhev, one of the Kaspersky analysts, wrote a blog post on Viruslist.com describing a site he discovered that offers stolen credit card numbers from all over the world.

Prices ranged from $2 to $6, with the lower priced cards being from the U.S. and the more expensive card coming from Germany. On the site are drop down menus allowing customers to specify what kind and how many cards they want and from what country of origin. The dealers even offer technical support and guarantees.

Identity thieves can buy, sell and trade identity information over the Internet in seconds. LifeLock’s eRecon™ patrols over 10,000 criminal websites, monitoring the Internet for the illegal selling of your information, and notifies you if your personal information is found being misused online.

Visit LifeLock.com to learn more. Enroll using the LifeLock promotion code DEFENSE and pay only $9 a month.