The researchers hypothesize that the price differences for hacking the various email providers and the change in pricing are likely driven by what they call both operational and economic factors: namely, Google and Yahoo have gotten better at protecting email accounts, while prices have increased as the market for a specific service shrinks: Yahoo hacking prices have tracked the same as Google, while Facebook and Instagram hacking prices have actually fallen to the current average of $307. For those services that did agree to take on the challenge of hacking Gmail accounts, the cost ballooned over the course of two years, from $123 to $384 – with a peak of $461 in February 2018. Many were outright scams – not too surprising – and some wouldn’t even take on the job if it involved attacking Gmail. Fortunately, most hackers for hire aren’t up to the task, to say the least.

Think of spearphishing or whaling attacks that are so convincing because they get all the details right, such as forging company invoices or setting up copycat log-in sites that steal account credentials. Such services offer targeted attacks that remain a potent threat, the researchers said, due to the fact that they’re so tailored. The researchers were specifically interested in a segment of black-market services known as hackers for hire: the crooks you send in when you lack the hacking skills to do the job yourself and the morals that whisper in your ear that this is not a nice, or legal, thing to do. Hackers for hire are a bunch of swindlers, according to research published last week by Google and academics from the University of California, San Diego.

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