Cybercriminals Are Adopting Corporate Best Practices

Orome1 writes: Cybercriminals are adopting corporate best practices and establishing professional businesses in order to increase the efficiency of their attacks against enterprises and consumers. This new class of professional cybercriminal spans the entire ecosystem of attackers, extending the reach of enterprise and consumer threats and fueling the growth of online crime. Low-level criminal attackers are even creating call center operations to increase the impact of their scams. "Advanced criminal attack groups now echo the skill sets of nation-state attackers. They have extensive resources and a highly-skilled technical staff that operate with such efficiency that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off," said Kevin Haley, director, Symantec Security Response. "We are even seeing low-level criminal attackers create call center operations to increase the impact of their scams."

Comments

Relief! Finally!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I was very much worried about the cyber criminals. Despaired what/who could stop them.

Finally, relieved. Corporate best practices! If that does not kill their efficiency and agility, nothing will. Hope the also implement agile rally scrum thingies complete with kanban board and daily dissing of waterfall development. Seven layers of managers telling the lone code monkey what to do, quarterly story point estimates, progress reports, burn down charts, ... the works. So much time will be spent in measuring progress and in planning meeting, nothing will ever get done. Great!

Re:Relief! Finally!

[mlts]

I am not surprised. It can be asserted that malware is the best written software in existence today, because it had to be small, work flawlessly, and do its job well. Unlike most shops where "it builds, ship it" is the mantra, malicious software has to fly under the radar, or it will be detected and destroyed pretty quickly.

Re:Relief! Finally!

[PopeRatzo]

I am not surprised

Neither am I. After all, corporations have adopted criminal best practices for decades.

Re:Relief! Finally!

[Greyfox]

Funnily, none of those things on their own will actually kill your productivity. What will is jumping on the bandwagon of the month without giving everyone time to get used to whatever process you put in place. And the thing about organized crime is, if your manager is bad, you just kill them. So I suspect that a lot of organized criminal enterprises might actually end up being nicer workplace environments than many of the companies that I've worked for in the past. And although their retirement packages might suck, they couldn't be any worse than corporate America right now.

Question

[The-Ixian]

Do low-level criminal attackers create call center operations to increase the impact of their scams?

I don't think this summary answered that question adequately.

Re:Question

[wardrich86]

It'd still be better than calling Comcast

Great, now even cybercriminals file TPS reports

[Irick]

Where am I going to fantasize about escaping the mediocrity of corporate existence now?

that's why it's called Organized Crime

[turkeydance]

and the boss still sucks.

Re:Since when do noisy call centers full of

[duke_cheetah2003]

Indians speaking horrible English "increase the impact of their scams"?

Unless by "increase the impact" they mean, "make it an obvious scam"...

Oh I dunno, having Indians being their call center goons would legitimize them even more, since they'd be on par with actual legitimate businesses.