What does $8000 buy you nowadays? Enough iPads to equip the entire family, with matching MacBook Airs thrown in for good measure? A couple of 3D TVs? If you're a cybercriminal, it'll buy you a pretty sweet hacker's toolkit.
But don't worry if you're too dumb to understand complicated computer stuff. Contemporary hacker's toolkits are user-friendly. You can even purchase a support contract. If the security holes the toolkit exploits get patched, there's no problem--it can auto-update with new attack definitions.

All this is revealed in a new report by Symantec, which profiles the increasing sophistication of hacker's toolkits over recent years, and the criminal underworld that's grown around them.

The link for this article located at PC World is no longer available.