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US Cyber Criminal Underground a Shopping Free-For-All (csoonline.com)
itwbennett writes: According to a new report by Trend Micro, the North American cyber criminal underground has "[essentially] become a gun show for everyone as long as they can participate and are willing to pay," said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro. Their research revealed that 15% of underground sites sell offer crimeware and allow criminals to buy a variety of malware and hacking services, such as crypting. It's the hottest-selling item, other than drugs, said Kellermann. In case you're wondering, murder for hire sites make up just 1% of the underground mall.
But the bad guys didn’t exactly take this innovation laying down; rather, they responded with their own innovations. What they came up with is known as the “crypting” service, a service that has spawned an entire industry that I would argue is one of the most bustling and lucrative in the cybercrime underground today.
Put simply, a crypting service takes a bad guy’s piece of malware and scans it against all of the available antivirus tools on the market today — to see how many of them detect the code as malicious. The service then runs some custom encryption routines to obfuscate the malware so that it hardly resembles the piece of code that was detected as bad by most of the tools out there. And it repeats this scanning and crypting process in an iterative fashion until the malware is found to be completely undetectable by all of the antivirus tools on the market.
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Nice F'ing analogy; a gun show. Has he ever been to a gun show? Most of the tables selling guns are FFL. The rest beef jerky, tools, ammo, etc. Sheesh, you have to be an FFL to be a "dealer". There are no unlicensed "dealers". Sure, there are a few with signs hung on their backs with a long gun on shoulder, advertising a private sale, but they are few.http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/12/07/203211/us-cyber-criminal-underground-a-shopping-free-for-all#
That quote is ridiculous. Anybody who's ever been to a gun show can tell you it's one of the safest most orderly mass congregations of people you'll ever have the pleasure of attending. The stuff that's for sale adheres to strict local, state, and federal laws. And there is no tolerance by the show management, attendees, or other vendors of shenanigans.