Your Identity Is Worth $5 on the Black Market

In other words, significantly less than it's worth to you

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Hackers have access to your data, and they’re selling it for only $5, according to an article in GigaOm.

You enter a great deal of information about yourself online every day. Whether you’re inputting your credit card information on a site like Amazon, verifying an account with your social security number or simply checking your Twitter feed, you’re exposing yourself to hackers. All your online information can be bundled and sold on the black market.

Think that your credit card number, social security number, expiration date and mother’s maiden name would be worth thousands to someone trying to steal your identity? Think again. Such “fulls”—a single package with all the aforementioned information—sell for only $4 or $5 per victim.

But according to cyber security experts at RSA, the security division of EMC, financial information isn’t the only thing hackers are mining from your web activity. Stealing social media accounts is becoming more and more profitable. 10,000 followers on Twitter sell for $15, and 100,000 likes sell for about $115. 1000 likes on Facebook sell for $15. By comparison, 1000 credit card numbers cost just $6.

“Based on that we’ve been seeing lately, while financial fraud is still the main goal of many hackers, there is an increased interest in social media accounts,” Idan Aharoni, head of RSA Cyber Intelligence told GigaOm. “Interesting, but not surprising—cybercriminals go where the money is and if they can make money by selling social media followers and ‘likes,’ we’ll definitely see some of them move in that direction.”

So be wary where you click. You may lose thousands if someone else purchases your hacked information for a few bucks.