Identities sold online for £80

The Telegraph:

Complete identities are being sold online for just £80, internet experts have discovered.

The stolen personal data include credit card details, plus the cardholder’s name, address, passport and driving licence numbers.

Once stolen, the average identity yields online fraudsters around £15,000, researchers found.

Individual pieces of stolen data are available for as little as £5.

A study for Get Safe Online Week found one in five people use the same password for all their internet logins, leaving them wide open to hacking.

Half those surveyed did not update their anti-virus software often enough.

And nearly a quarter did not have any protection against spyware.

I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention another source of our personal data – information stored by the government and left in pub car parks, for example.