Stolen Twitter accounts can now be worth more to hackers than credit card details, according to research that shows the law of supply and demand affects the cybercrime industry in the same way it does legitimate business.

Credit card details – once the "currency of the black market" – were worth between $20 and $40 when fresh, quickly dropping to as low as $2 when "stale". But recent data breaches have caused a glut of data to flood onto the market, slashing the cost of stolen card details, writes security expert Michael Callahan of Juniper Networks.

Lucrative: Social media account details can be worth more than stolen credit cards. Credit:AP

Access to social media accounts such as Twitter can be worth far more, varying from $16 to more than $325, because of the hints they can provide on how to hack into other aspects of a victim's online identity.

"Social media and other credentials include usernames and passwords, which can often be used as an entry point to launch attacks on that person’s accounts on a number of other sites," he said.