Forest Global Training Partners

Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

How to Buy Friends and Deceive People

Summary: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego examined nearly seven years of data from freelancer.com and found that 65-70 percent of the 84,000+ jobs offered for bidding appeared to be legitimate work, while the remainder centered on four classes of "dirty" jobs: account registration and verification, social network linking, search engine optimization, and ad posting and bulk mailing. The study found buyers can obtain a thousand phone-verified Gmail accounts for $300 or a thousand Facebook "friends" for $26, all provided through manual labor, and that services like twitterfollowershop.com and buytwitterfollowers.com charge between $17 and $24.95 per 1,000 followers.

Key Takeaway: Phone verification, the control many services rely on to stop mass account creation, is priced by this market at roughly 25 cents per Gmail account versus a 10-20 fold higher price for Craigslist accounts - meaning attackers pay only what a given defense is worth to defeat.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Fraud & Scams
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