How Much Your Inbox Is Worth to Cybercriminals

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Brian Krebs breaks down just how much your inbox is worth to cybercrooks. The answer? More than you think. :eek:

The true value of your email account to crooks is not merely in its ability to pump spam or even forward malicious software and viruses to your entire contact list. Depending on what you do with your account and how long you've had it, your inbox could be worth far more than you imagine.
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Is why I dont use an online email client and an IP blocker to keep out everywhere except that I allow.
Emails are downloaded and deleted from the server every 10 mins.
They have to be pretty quick to nab anything.
 
Spot on as usual by Mr. Krebs. Spam Nation is on my Christmas list, can't wait to read it.
 
I'm pretty sure Google knows the exact value of your inbox and the value of all the associated accounts that Mr. Brain mentions since they're busy mining all of it for stuff already. :p
 
I'm sorry, I couldn't read the article. I was too distracted but an ad on the side that looked like this..

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http://sploid.gizmodo.com/seeing-a-giant-rubber-band-ball-being-cut-in-half-is-fr-1672816265
 
drescherjm said:
I expect the same Microsoft and Yahoo...
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For now, I don't. Microsoft makes almost none of its money from advertising so it has a lot less incentive to go through the effort of collecting, storing, and mining data. In addition, the records they do keep, besides being an expense to harvest, totally become a legal liability when some alphabet soup agency wants to look at them. In addition to that, Google's ad services and analytics are far more commonplace (seriously, go get Google's domain list from Wikipedia and then intentionally block all those domains and see how few ads appear in your otherwise unmodified broswer and then try it with Microsoft's ad domains) so their reach is a lot longer and they actively combine that with usage data from browsers, phone GPS stuff, app usage, text messages, calls, and anything phone cameras capture. For now, Microsoft is probably the lesser of two evils when it comes to total creeper companies. :)
 
I don't know about you guys, but if my email account was compromised, someone could reset passwords to all of my other accounts -- provided they had my other accounts' logins.
 
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