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A Look Inside the Bustling Cybercrime Marketplace
wiredmikey writes "Cybercrime's underground activity, much like a Middle Eastern bazaar, is a loud and boisterous market. Buying, selling, haggling and cheating all take place in these marketplaces. Each marketplace houses other specialized-markets of illegitimate goods. There's the credit cards market, the bot rental market, another one for viruses, and one more for the credentials – to name a few. The column discusses how cybercriminals communicate, how these markets operate and how hacker transactions are being performed."
What nonsense. The author basically says that the "hackers" are using the internet to communicate. And makes silly claims like "While ["hacker"] forums are picked up by search engines".... I've never come accross a CC forum that doesn't disallow searchengines from indexing the real stuff in robots.txt.
securityweek.com - yet another site with writers who don't know their subject.
Here, I'll summarize it for you:
"Cybercriminals" use: Underground Forums, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, Instant Messaging (IM), and Social Networks. And they use Russian versions of Paypal for payments.
That's the whole of the article. In the next column, she's going to talk about what goods cybercriminals trade for money.
The IRC channel is analogous to an exclusive party where matches as well as transactions all occur within a specific IRC channel.
She could've just called it a private chatroom and skip writing the entire paragraph.
Most cyber-crime these days is perpetrated by paid professionals and in some cases backed by very wealthy crime syndicates and even protected by corrupt government officials (I'm not going to name anyone here, but since this is mostly Russian/former east block in origin, I'm sure the average Slashdotter can figure it out). The idea of the lone hacker sitting in his bedroom doing evil is just stupid. Phishing, ID scams, ATM skimmer production etc., are all well funded and highly professional activities. So who is surprised that they trade online? When was the last time you heard about any major conviction in a Russian jurisdiction? To them it is just business, so of course they transact on the internet too...
Meus subcriptio est nocens Latin quoniam bardus populus reputo is sanus callidus
"Cybercrime's underground activity, much like a Middle Eastern bazaar, is a loud and boisterous market. Buying, selling, haggling and cheating all take place in these marketplaces". ...and Wall Street. But why pass up an opportunity to criticise people in the Middle East when Westerns are so darn quiet and honest?
Well, I'm offended by this. I am from South East Asia and I resent the author for implying that the markets in my geographical area is not as loud and boisterous. So are these hackers wearing fez and smoking shisha. Do they have towels wrapped around their heads and greet everyone with Salamalaikum? Seriously, this article reads like it is written for 70-80 year old retirees on AOL.