Thieves set up data supermarkets

By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter, BBC News

Many web criminals are selling stolen patient records

Web criminals are stepping back from infecting computers themselves and creating "one-stop shops" which offer gigabytes of data for a fixed price.

Speaking at InfoSecurity Europe, security firm Finjan said it had seen thousands of such online services.

Experts at the conference said web fraud was skyrocketing and called for police to urgently address the problem.

Security guru Bruce Schneier said anti-cyber crime efforts needed to be closely allied to the scale of threats.

Price lists

At the three-day conference Finjan said the latest tactic adopted by web criminals is to buy sensitive data from third parties rather than run their own crimeware servers and toolkits that compromise websites.

Sites offering medical histories, information about the shipment of goods and corporate e-mail and pension details have all been uncovered by the firm.

"All this was found on one hacker's server and we believe it was information that was collected to be sold online," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan.

The web has been discovered by criminals in a big way Bruce Schneier, BT Counterpane

"It is even being marketed on certain forums - 'We are selling this type of data and here is our price list'," he said.

While credit card details are cheap, selling for only a few dollars, the logfiles of big companies can go for up to $300 (