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How much do you earn per day? If we look at how much a cybercriminal from Brazil earns every day, we’ll understand why Brazil is one of the main sources of malware in the world.

Brazilian cybercriminals really like to use short URLs to track infections and have their own stats. Here is the profile of one criminal using Bitly as a URL shortening service.

As you can see, in just one day, he was able to gain more than 33,000 clicks or potential infections! Let’s presume that just 10% of all the victim machines end up getting infected. That means approximately 3300 people are affected. In Brazil malware is usually spread in order to steal only credit card and online banking account information, and this was the case with this particular campaign. Account information for other Internet resources like Facebook, IM, email etc. was not stolen.

So, how much did the criminal make on that particular day? Let’s see: a unit price on the black market for stolen Brazilian credit cards is about $8 USD.  Now let’s suppose that the average savings in a bank account amount to about $500 USD. Cybercriminals from Brazil don’t sell access to the stolen bank accounts; they use the accounts themselves, cleaning them out completely. After some simple math 3305*8 + 3305*500 we get a daily earnings figure of $ 1678940 USD! Of course it will take some time to cash this money in, but the sum is enough motivation to get the work done.

Of course, in real life the rate of infection would be higher than just 10%. In most cases it can easily be between 50 and 60%.

The lack of legislation in many countries like Brazil makes it possible to steal huge amounts of money with little risk of going to jail.