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."

Comments

One-line summary.

[CriminalNerd]

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.

-1, Reinforcing regional stereotypes

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Re:Middle Eastern?

[h4rm0ny]

I always put a Fez on and smoke a shisha whilst I crack a big corporation's mail server. It just puts me in the right mood somehow.