The Underground Digital Economy

The October 2007 issue of the ISSA journal has a very alarming article called as "The Underground Digital Economy" by Dean Turner.

The summary of the article is : Driven by the promise of big profits, cybercriminals have built the foundation of an underground digital economy.

Figures have been taken from the "Internet Security Threat Report" from Symantec.

Interesting revelation is:

A credit card from a US based bank will sell for USD 1 to USD6 while a full identity (US bank account information, CC data, date of birth, mother's maiden name and SSN, sell for USD 14-18

A question I have is - which phase of the WWW are we entering into? My thought resonates with the question I had put to Sir Tim Berners-Lee in person - "Does the current growing Internet Fraud menace keep him awake at night?". He basically had said "No".