Cybercriminals are offering 21 million German bank account details for €12m (£10m) on the black market, according to report published in WirtschaftsWoche (Economic Week).
Jounalists obtained a CD containing 1.2 million accounts after a November face-to-face meeting with criminals in a Hamburg hotel, according to the magazine.
Posing as buyers working for a gambling business, the journalists were able to strike a price of €0.55 per record, or €12m for all the data. They were given a CD containing the 1.2 million accounts when they asked for assurances that the information they would be buying was legitimate.
That CD contained the names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, account numbers and bank routing numbers of the theft victims, they reported. In some cases, the victim's account balance was also provided. The data was most likely collected from call centre employees, the magazine reports.
Although banking passwords were apparently not included on the CD, criminals would be able to use this data to withdraw funds from a victim's account, said Thierry Zoller, an independent security consultant based in Luxembourg.
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Scammers could use this type of information to initiate a large number of debits from German banks, making each withdrawal small in hopes that it would not be noticed by the victim, he said.
This is the second high-profile German data breach in the past two months. In October, Deutsche Telekom reported that thieves had stolen a storage device containing account information on about 17 million customers of its T-Mobile Germany subsidiary. That breach did not involve bank or credit card information, however.
When sold in small quantities, full bank account details can fetch as much as $1,000 per record, said Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner Research. "Without a doubt, bank accounts yield the highest value in the black market," she said.
She said that it's remarkable that this type of breach was reported in Germany.
"You'd think Germany would have some of the tightest controls around bank account data," Litan said. "Europe has very strong privacy laws and Germany is one of the biggest enforcers of those privacy laws. So I think the fact that this data was available on the German black market shows how far the criminals have gone."
Comments
Frank irvine said: The security breaches are a result of the theft of bank details from Bank of Lichtenstien fir the president of Germany Adrea Merckel whop paid a bank employee to steal a CD with banking details of thousands of ofshore accounts She should be hung as should every other head of state or civil servant who used the information of even received the CD from her Why is he not in prison She has not even been charged with the instigating the theft for which her emissary is sitting in prison Her theft is an act of war when undertaken by a head of one state on another soveriegn state Why is she still around anyone else would be in prison The reason for the see no evil by the EU is they hoped to get access to the records to try and screw the active members of society out of yet more hard earned money to feather their own nests