Many of the people behind identity theft scams are themselves having data stolen from them in the process, a security researcher has revealed.

Phishers, who trick online banking users into typing in their details to fake sites, use tools in the process which have built-in security holes for others to access the data that many do not have the technical skills to spot, according to a security researcher.

Nitesh Dhanjan will next week tell the Black Hat security conference in Washington of the results of his and his colleague Billy Rios's immersion in the world of phishers. He told OUT-LAW Radio of his findings this week.

Dhanjani claims that most phishers are far from the technical sophisticates of the popular imagination. Most, he said, use pre-written phishing kits that take little skill to operate.

"What you see in [the kits] is ready made phishing sites," he said. "All the research we've done is just basically what you can do from a web browser without even crossing the line where it's called hacking."

Dhanjani said it was extremely easy to come across details that had been stolen just hours previously. "Within 15 minutes of starting this research we were staring at people's bank accounts and credit card numbers and ATM PIN numbers posted on international message boards," he said.

But the authors of the phishing kits are using more junior phishers to do the work for them. Dhanjani said when he and Rios, who both work for un-named major corporations, looked at the computer code in the kits, they found that it had two different instructions commanding the system to email a victim's details.

"We realised that in the second mail command there was a hard coded email address that the victim's information was also going to," said Dhanjani. "So unbeknown to the phisher deploying this kit, his information from the victim is going to him in addition to the author who wrote this kit, so there you have a phisher phishing a phisher."

Gartner estimated that phishing scams cost $3.2bn in 2007, and there are significant costs over and above the money lost because it is often very difficult and time consuming for people to prove that they were not responsible for spending in their name.

Dhanjani said that there is no easy fix to the problem. He said that until banks and governments have more sophisticated systems than just simple credit card or government identity numbers the problem will continue.

He said, though, that the cost of changing those systems was greater than the sums currently being lost, meaning the systems are unlikely to change soon.

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