"Cybercriminals can see what you enter (TYPE!)

on your screen and steal your credit card information or bank account information."

Cybercriminals are making a killing off of stolen identities, creating their own market for

buying and selling credit card and bank account information on the cheap.

Cybercrime has become a rapidly growing underground business built by savvy criminals, who buy and sell valuable stolen financial information from millions of unsuspecting Internet users every year in an on online black market.

"Most cybercriminals are very, very interested in financial gain by compromising customer accounts," said FBI special agent Austin Berglas, who supervises the Bureau's New York Internet crimes squad. "Believe it or not, there are people who fall victim to their scams, and we see it every day."

Because cybercriminals are so skilled at hacking into thousands of computers every day, the crime is potentially a billion-dollar business. If every stolen credit card and bank account had been wiped clean last year, that would have netted cybercriminals some $8 billion, according to data from Symantec, maker of the Norton antivirus software.

As a result of the lucrative payout, more and more online criminals are entering the game. In fact, the number of new Internet security threats rose nearly three-fold last year to 1.7 million.



Those cyber attacks mostly come from malware, or malicious software, that hands control of your computer, and anything on it or entered into it, over to the bad guys without you even knowing it. The most common forms of malware include keystroke logging, spyware, viruses, worms and Trojan horses.

"Credit cards and bank account information made up 51% of the goods advertised on the underground economy last year, up from 38% in 2007. Credit cards are most popular because they're the cheapest stolen commodity."



Security software also helps, but it far from solves the problem. To avoid detection, many cybercriminals will send out just a handful of viruses before modifying the code and sending it out again.



"The truth is that 'fingerprint' security technology is no longer effective," said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of product development at Symantec. "The bad guys that got involved are organized professionals, and they figured out how to get around our technology."