The (Not So) High Price of Crime

Ever wonder how much a hacker charges to hack someone’s email for you?  Wonder no more.

Dell Secureworks, now a separate publicly traded company, publishes an annual report on the cost of crime.  They look at both Russian speaking and English speaking underground markets.

So here it is.  Place your orders soon 🙂

• $129 – cost to hack your GMail or similar account
• $500 – to hack your corporate email
• $65 to $103 – to hack popular Russian email accounts
• $129 – to hack into Ukrainian email accounts
• $90 – to hack the IP address of your computer
• $129 – to hack your Facebook or other social media account
• $194 – to hack into a Russian social media account
• $173 – fake U.S., U.K., German or Israeli driver’s license
• $140 to $250 – fake physical social security card
• $3,000 to $10,000 – fake physical U.S. passport
• $7 to $15 – fake Visa card
• $30 – Premium Visa, Amex or Discover card
• $5 to $10 – remote access trojan software
• $80 to $440 for encryption malware
• $20 to $40 for hacking tutorials
• $350 – for instructions on how to hack a website
• $40 to $80 – A U.S. bank account with $1,000 to $2,000 in it

The report goes on, but you get the idea.

What surprises me is how cheap this seems to be.  Either they think it is pretty easy or they don’t value their labor very much.  My guess is that it is pretty easy.

The only number that does not surprise me is the cost of a fake U.S. passport.  With the chips and encryption in them now, that is probably hard.

The hackers have definitely turned this into a volume industry and I suspect that they make a lot of money.

Just food for thought.

Information for this post came from Digital Trends.

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