Hackers vs. Phishers

An anonymous reader writes "Some hackers out there don't like to do all the hard work of running a successful phishing campaign. Instead, they developed a simple online service to 'steal' account details from the hard-working phishers. Named AutoWhaler, the service allows anyone to scan a phishing server for log files that contain juicy information such as usernames and passwords."

Comments

Well, obviously

[Anonymusing]

FBI: Why do you rob banks?
Willie Sutton: Because that's where the money is.

Re:Well, obviously

[commodore64_love]

Reporter: Why are you a bank?
AIG: Because that lets us rob the U.S. Treasury

Not surprised

[zmaragdus]

Criminals stealing from criminals? Doesn't surprise me. It happens all the time in the physical world.

(Before the deluge of malice-laden replies regarding "how I make all hackers out to be villians," yes, I know the difference between white hat and black hat.)

Re:Not surprised

[nahdude812]

A big part of why it's so alluring is that when you steal from a thief, not only is the grunt work already done, the chain of evidence gets disrupted. Leads past that point are likely to be interpreted as an attempt at misdirection (particularly in the case where information theft does not destroy the original information - the original phisher looks like the end of the line). Plus nobody is going to call the police that illegal information was stolen, doing so requires them to first admit their own crime, or at least put themselves at very high jeopardy of discovery.

So if you can crack a phisher, you're far less likely to face real world retribution (though maybe they'll work on cracking you back).

This makes phishers a much juicier, safer target, though presumably they're quite a lot more savvy than the average user, so pulling it off is likely harder.

People of ill repute diong thingfs of ill repute

[asdf7890]

People of ill repute do things of ill repute. Even to each other. Is anyone really surprised?

This is no different from a car thief stealing cars from another car thief, aside from it involving the internet (therefore probably making it newly patentable!) and perhaps a matter of scale.

Hackers and phishers

[schmidt349]

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

Re:Dag-nabbit!

[Chrisq]

Well, back in my day we had to do real work. There were no computers to help like you namby pamby phishers have to day. It was get up at 5am, check out the garbage of the local banks, then spend 8 hours hand typing investment certificates and forging cheque books. What is the criminal underworld coming to?

Re:"mod parent up"

[commodore64_love]

"mod parent down" - This comment generated by AntispamWikibot. If you feel this was an error, report your complaint to Abusebot.

Aside -

I always find it amusing when I see wikipedia bots caught in a revert war with one another. Who watches the watchers? Apparently nobody.

Re:misuse of the term 'hacker'

[Princeofcups]

Note that the perjorative use has been deprecated.

And the jargon file represents, what, less than 5% of the English speaking world? The rest use the word hacker. Sorry, the battle is already lost.