Dive Brief:

• Cybercriminals doubled their rate of account creation fraud over the summer, according to a new report from NuData Security.

• The report analyzed 500 million account creations and found that between May and July, 57% were high risk or fraudulent — up from 28% in February, March and April.

• Experts say criminals are increasingly focusing on opening new accounts because it usually gives them more time to use the victim’s credit before being discovered.

Dive Insight:

According to Ryan Wilk, NuData's director of customer success, creating a brand new account can be very profitable for criminals and is increasingly easy because of all the data that has been stolen recently.

"As breaches are continuing to happen, the cybercriminals are getting larger and larger swatches of data," Wilk said. "They assemble this data into a full set of data about your identity. We're even finding that criminals are more and more looking to check credit ratings on these data points, from companies giving away free credit reports.”