Return of the Web Mob

Parore writes "eWeek is running a story about the return of the web mob, highlighting all the similiarities between the online attacks and the real-world mafia. From the article: "Black hat hackers have set up e-commerce sites offering private exploits capable of evading anti-virus scanners. An e-mail advertisement intercepted by researchers contained an offer to infect computers for use in botnets at $25 per 10,000 hijacked PCs. Skilled hackers in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America are selling zero-day exploits on Internet forums where moderators even test the validity of the code against anti-virus software."

Comments

Re:Some don't care, some don't understand...

[AK Marc]

It was tangible, they could deal with it :)

They are all tangible at some point. Someone uses a stolen credit card number to buy a widget. Sure, it takes 20 steps of "cyber crime" until the actual fraud is committed, but the crimes always come back to the physical. The problem is that the physical is too late to stop, in most cases.

I called the FBI on two occassions and told them of people that were trying to defraud me. They asked, "did they already get any money from you?" when I told them I wasn't that stupid, they said they weren't intersted in the solicited fraud. They wouldn't investigate without actual loss, they are too busy to prevent crime or catch people that probably did successfully defraud others. They'd rather have the open case they can ignore when the next person doesn't know what a 419 is...