How Much is Your Facebook Account Worth to Hackers?

Most of us have the idea that our data must be worth substantial amounts of money to Facebook and whoever happens to wrangle it from us. We've got the inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, telling us to demand for our data, for crying out loud. Surely, it must be worth something.

In fact, it really is worth something--just not very much. Dancho Danchev from Webroot recently stumbled upon a couple of Russian websites that were selling compromised social networking accounts by the hundreds.So here's a pricelist: roughly $6 for 500 Facebook accounts and $11 for a thousand of them. Twiter accounts are apparently more valuable, because they go for $7.70 for 500 accounts. Your email account might seem most important to you, but they're actually at the bottom of the food chain, going for about eight bucks for ten thousand accounts! Yes, you read that right: 10,000, but of the Mail.ru variety.

Where are all these accounts coming from? Dancho explains:

According to the details, they managed to obtain access to these accounts through social engineering and brute-forcing.

On a daily basis, cybercriminals persistently data mine botnets for stolen email, social network, VPN, FTP and SSH accounting data in an attempt to further abuse it by launching additional attacks.

Guys and gals, be careful with your data and avoid visiting shady sites when you can. Wisen up to scam emails and learn how to avoid scareware while you're at it to safeguard your accounts and your computer.