Ever wondered how cybercrooks do it?
Do they need to be technology wizards? Programming geeks? Website developers?
Spam kings? Hard-core reverse engineers?
In fact, these days, they don’t need much more than a determination to break the law and to get rich illegally at other people’s expense. (And, increasingly, to risk a pretty serious prison sentence if they’re caught.)
That’s because there’s a sizeable underground “malware-as-a-service” industry, where technically adept cybercriminals rent out all the technical wizardry that wannabe crooks need to join the ranks of the criminally active.
The words “hacker’s toolkit” no longer have the innocent meaning of the past, where they referred to a floppy disk of handy low-level utilities that your favourite sysadmin carried everywhere, just in case your MS-DOS hard disk stopped playing ball.
These days, there’s a much more sinister hacker’s toolkit available – a grab-bag of cybercrime services for hire: a cybercriminal “cloud services economy,” if like.
You can pay someone else to write your malware, infect a chosen number of victims, steal data, send spam, log keystrokes, extort money, and much more.
So…how does this underground work? What can we do about it?
By Sophos
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