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

Re:Product Fulfillment?

[sco08y]

I've actually tried, out of curiosity, to order something. I rarely get to a working web page, let alone an order form. Sometimes you'll see a 1800 number. Many times you'll just be redirected to a page full of ads.

Economies of scale

[Facetious]

The risk/reward concept of crime is complicated by economies of scale. Prior to the Series-Of-Tubes(TM), it was fairly difficult to con more than one person at a time. Now, many high school students have the power to con millions of people across international borders. The potential reward has gone up. The perceived potential of risk has gone down. Thus, cybercrime rises.