Slashdot Mirror
Access To Thousands Of Compromised Government Servers Selling For $6 On Black Market
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have uncovered an underground market selling information of over 70,000 compromised servers. Russia-based Kaspersky Lab revealed that the online forum, named xDedic, seems to be operated by a Russian-speaking organisation and allows hackers to pay for undetectable access to a wide range of servers, including those owned by government, corporate and academic groups in more than 170 countries. Access to a compromised server can be bought for as little as $6. This kit comes with relevant tools to instruct on launching denial-of-service attacks and spam campaigns on the targeted network, as well as allowing criminals to illegally produce bitcoin and breach online systems, such as retail payment platforms.
It's nearly impossible to mine them profitably. E.g. you'd pay more in electricity then you gain. But if you have enough hosts and don't need to pay for the electricity you're using, or you have access to powerful servers that (again) you don't have to pay for, it changes the economics.
Min.
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before