Cyber criminals could be raking in profits 20 times greater than the cost of their attacks.
According to research by Kaspersky Lab of the cost of the most frequently used hacker tools with the money stolen in a successful malicious operation, the money made can be significant. In the case of creating a phishing page that mimics a popular social network site, as well as setting up a spam mailing list that links victims to the fake site, can costs an average of $150. However, if the cyber criminals catch 100 people they can get up to $10,000 by selling sensitive data.
Also, a mobile Trojan blocker today costs $1,000 on average to buy and distribute. However, the prices that the attackers set for unblocking a smartphone vary from $10 to $200, which means that from 100 potential victims they can get up to $20,000.
To really hit the jackpot, fraudsters look for banking Trojans that target money directly. After spending approximately $3,000 on the malware, the exploit and the spam mailing list to spread the virus, cybercriminals could scoop up to $72,000. The average loss of an individual victim is $722.
Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Buying malware is currently not a problem: it’s easy to find them on various hacker forums, and they are relatively cheap, making them attractive.
“A cyber criminal following this illegal path doesn’t even need any skills – for a fixed price they can get an off-the-peg package to launch their attacks at will.”
Research by PandaLabs found that during Q3 of 2014, an average of 227,747 new malware samples were created every day and Trojans were the most common malware type, accounting for 78.08 per cent of malware.
Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs at Panda Security, said: “Over recent months, cyber crime has continued growing. Cyber crooks are still creating malware in order to infect as many computers as possible and access confidential data.”
