How Much is Your Gmail Worth?
Summary: Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago launched Cloudsweeper, a service that scans a Gmail inbox via OAuth2 and prices the account by totaling the underground resale value of the retail accounts tied to that address; a Krebs on Security test account was valued at $28.90, with hijackable accounts at Amazon, Apple, Groupon, Hulu, Newegg, Paypal, Skype, UPlay and Yahoo. The tool also uses IMAP to find passwords that services sent in plain text and lets users redact or encrypt them, and Kanich noted that anyone with access to the email account can simply request a new password from the site that sent it.
What you should know: One seller quoted in the article buys hacked iTunes accounts for $8 and Groupon credentials for $5, so a single inbox can be worth roughly $28.90 to a buyer - and the article notes many of the plaintext passwords it found came from antivirus vendors, firms that should know better.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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