The payroll for all these informants and the rest of NDS Operational Security in Britain came to more than £1 million for a six-month period. And that was only one part of the worldwide NDS OpSec operation. Agents or informants appeared on the NDS budget under “Consultancy”. Contacts was a highly elastic term. The largest expense was ADSR, Oliver Koemmerling’s company.

"This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

Some of the most valuable data extracted from hacked PCs is bank login information. But non-financial logins also have value, particularly for shady online shops that collect and resell this information. Logins for everything from Amazon.com to Walmart.com often are resold — either in bulk, or separately by retailer name — on underground crime forums. A miscreant who operates a Citadel botnet of respectable size (a few thousand bots, e.g.) can expect to quickly accumulate huge volumes of “logs,” records of user credentials and browsing history from victim PCs. Without even looking that hard, I found several individuals on Underweb forums selling bulk access to their botnet logs; for example, one Andromeda bot user was selling access to 6 gigabytes of bot logs for a flat rate of $150.