Page 43 - Cyber Warnings
P. 43
North America's cybercrime marketplace hides in plain sight on
Surface Web
By Alex Lating, Product Marketing Manager, Hexis Cyber Solutions
A fascinating new study offers cybersecurity professionals a window into the online black market for
cybercrime tools and services.
Trend Micro conducted research, which it recently published in a white paper titled "North American
Underground: The Glass Tank."
On view for all, but fragile
The 33-page report takes its name from the oddly open character of the marketplace in the United
States and Canada as contrasted against the closed systems prevalent in Russia and Asia.
"This underground is not a locked vault accessible only to the tech-savviest of hackers, but rather a
glass tank open and visible to both cybercriminals and law enforcement," the report's authors
concluded.
Researchers found that the right search queries can quickly direct aspiring cybercriminals to the
tools and services they need to hack into a network or embed ransomware.
'Crypting services' are enormously popular
Criminals can even get malware they've designed as "crypted" so as to allegedly cloak it from
cybersecurity tools. Researchers say there's a good chance this is the single most popular service
on the cybercrime black market.
The idea is to check the malware against a range of security products to see which ones
successfully flag the code as malicious. The code then gets additional encryption until it, too, can
pass through the cyberdefenses.
Price lists for tools of the cyberthieving trade
One of the most interesting aspects of the report was learning the prices for various nefarious
offerings. Here's a sample, including for keyloggers that invisibly track user input, the components
for distributed denial of services attacks and remote access tools:
Keylogger - $1 to $4.
Ransomware - $10.
BetaBot DDoS tool - $74.
Xena RAT builder - $1 to $50.
43 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – January 2016 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide
