Security Tools News & Tips

Hacking isn’t a kid’s game anymore. Market for the stolen identities has reached $1 billion and online criminals are taking many sophisticated approach. InformationWeek has an interesting and detailed story about how the hacker economy works?

Some take a Direct Approach

Some hackers take the direct approach. Ransom scams–in which a criminal infects a company’s systems with malware that encrypts data and then demands money to provide the decryption key–are common in Russia. Uriel Maimon, a researcher with the consumer division of RSA, a security vendor now owned by EMC, says he’s seen a half-dozen of these scams over the past five months.

Others put Malware For Sale

Another valuable commodity in the hacker economy is malware such as viruses, worms, and Trojan horse programs. These so-called exploits provide hackers entrée into corporate systems.

Certainly Phishing Pays Off

Phishing scams are also a thriving underground business, often employing groups of people who bring different skills to the table, says a Web application security consultant who goes by the name RSnake. The “spammer” scours the Web for e-mail addresses that can be sold to “hackers,” who look for security vulnerabilities to exploit, create phishing sites, and tell the spammers where to send the phishing e-mails on their behalf. Meantime, “carders” buy the information stolen by hackers to create the fraudulent credit and debit cards they use to steal money or sell to other criminals. Of course, the same cybercriminal can multitask, RSnake adds.

Pump And Dump

It’s a variation on the old “pump-and-dump” stock scam. In these scenarios, the thief will have invested in cheap, or penny, stocks using accounts based in the Cayman Islands or elsewhere offshore, where the accounts can be established anonymously. Once the thief buys or steals identity information, he can set up fraudulent accounts–or break into other people’s accounts, as in the case of Kamardin–and buy large quantities of those penny stocks, driving up the price.