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Online Criminals Outsource Their Work
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-04-08
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A study by security vendor Finjan suggested a trend in criminal behavior has them farming work out to established rings with a technology infrastructure in place.
Among the trends cited by Finjan in its Web Security Trends Report, the company found criminals with sufficient capital opting to engage in a business practice normally associated with legitimate businesses: outsourcing.
Botnet creators have been known to let spammers pay for access to compromised servers, which are then used to crank out millions of messages to inboxes all over the world.
Finjan dubbed the next iteration of this practice, "crimeware." It isn't only about botnet rental, or even using pre-made kits to create exploits, as Finjan observed:
After maturing into a full-fledged market driven by economical forces, we are now seeing a trend for cybercriminals to deploy the B2B model (business to business, or more accurately Criminal to Criminal, C2C). Owners of malicious sites share their victims with other site owners in order to leverage the strength of one site and provide business to the other.
It gets worse for security pros:
Currently, we see the rise of the Crimeware-as-a-Service (CaaS) model in the Crimeware-toolkit market.
It enables such a toolkit to gather the data from the victims and sort it according to some rough criteria for the users, since all the data and networking is already built-in and available for the criminals and attackers.
This development will further distant the criminals from the techies - a trend that we have seen evolving over the past couple of years. This trend will get a further boost with the catching on of the CaaS model.
The bad guys are becoming more organized and sophisticated year after year. This isn't an Internet crisis anymore, it's a global crisis, and one that probably can't be solved. The profit potential is so high that we doubt anything short of turning the planet into a cold, lifeless cinder will put a stop to it.
View All Articles by David Utter
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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