street prices for digital goods?

[David Molnar]

Dan Geer's comment about the street price of heroin as a metric for 
success has me thinking - are people tracking the street prices of 
digital underground goods over time? The Symantec Threat Reports do seem 
to report advertised prices for a basket of goods, starting in Volume XI 
(March 2007) and running through the present. For example, Volume XI 
Table 3 states a Skype account is worth $12, valid Hotmail cookie $3, 
etc. These are interesting, but it's hard to see changes since they're 
reported as a band of prices presumably aggregated from many different 
sources.

I've also seen price anecdotes from Team Cymru. Plus of course the 
"Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants" paper from CCS 
2007. Is there a continuous feed of prices published anywhere (besides 
the underground servers, of course), or is this still something where 
you have to go gather data yourself if you want it?

I'm curious because it would be interesting to look at the "street 
price" for a specific online bank's logins before and after the bank 
makes a change to its security practices. (One not particularly great 
example of a change: adopting EV certs.) Alternatively, look at the 
price of some good before and after a prosecution. If this has already 
been done, my apologies, I'd appreciate the pointer.

finally, does anyone happen to know of a good review of how the focus on 
street price has performed as a metric for drug interdiction? that is, I 
could imagine cases where some specific intervention causes street price 
to rise but this doesn't lead to a corresponding improvement in things 
like deaths from drug overdose, number of people using, etc. Does that 
happen in practice so far as we know or not?

-David Molnar

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