SAN JOSE: Internet criminals have been getting more “professional” for years, trying to run their businesses like Big Business to get better and more profitable at selling stolen data online.
Now the bad guys of the cyber-underworld are exhibiting other unexpected traits: remarkable patience and restraint in stalking their victims.
A new report by antivirus software vendor Symantec details a startling trend that highlights the inventive ways criminals are figuring out ways to make money online.
Hackers are sometimes breaking into online businesses and not stealing anything. Gone are the bull-in-the-China-shop days of plundering everything in sight once they have found a sliver of a security hole.
Instead of swiping all the customer data they can get their hands on, a small subset of hackers have concerned themselves with stealing only a very specific thing from the vendors they breach — they want access to the compromised companies’ payment-processing systems, and nothing else, according to the ‘Symantec Report on the Underground Economy,’ released on Monday.
Those systems allow the bad guys to check whether credit card numbers being hawked on underground chat rooms are valid, the same way the store verifies whether to accept a card payment or not.
It is a service the crooks sell to other fraudsters who do not trust that the stolen card numbers they are buying from someone else will actually work, and it is good business.
The bad guys hardly touch anything. The customer data for that store’s clientele remains intact. They do not install malicious software that turns the compromised machines into spam-spewing robots.
Think of it like taking a used car to a mechanic for an inspection before buying. Only in this case the mechanic’s a squatter who is holed up illegally in some other guy’s shop and using his tools when no one is around at night. And he cleans up spotlessly once he is done.
“They treat these things fairly pristinely so they can maintain access,” Alfred Huger, vice president for Symantec Security Response, said.
According to Symantec, in the company’s yearlong look at 135 so-called “underground economy servers” — all public servers hosting mostly legitimate chat channels, with a few bad ones catering to cyber crooks — researchers determined that criminals have latched on to this tactic as a way to make money and self-police the underground.
Symantec said it did not find out which vendors had been compromised. The company says it did not get inside the compromised servers that carry even more secretive back-channel conversations, because doing so would have broken the law.
The company’s researchers were only able to determine the trend is happening by looking at thousands of credit card numbers being checked every day — and either accepted or rejected — by shadowy groups online promoting that service and charging a fee. That fee is about $10 per card checked.
Plenty of bad guys are still looting everything in sight, according to Symantec’s study.
Researchers spotted $7 billion worth of stolen credit cards and bank accounts being sold during the yearlong project. — AP
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