Cybercrime Is a Franchise Model That Scales

Presto Vivace notes a report from the RSA conference on the cybercrime economy, and it's not an optimistic one. Part of the problem is that in many places cybercrime pays much better than legitimate work, including security research. "As the panelists explained, a single spam message might be tied to as many as 10 separate organizations and perhaps five suppliers. Every task in the criminal economy has become a separate specialty. Some people sell e-mail lists, others sell lists of compromised IP addresses, there are sellers of credit card numbers, and those who sell access to bot nets. Then there are those who handle product fulfillment for spammers, and those who specialize in laundering money."

Comments

Office Space clearly had an impact

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the big problems the guys in Office Space faced was how to launder their money. They were computer programmers who had no knowledge of the intricacies of money laundering. It's good to see someone recognized the problem and is now providing solutions for those of us who don't know how to launder money ourselves.