Hackers are on the Dark Web, selling cybercrime-as-a-service and hiring hackers and common criminals with a promise they will get rich.
When we spoke to hacker strategist and security podcaster J. Wolfgang Goerlich at a SecureWorld cybersecurity conference recently, he put it like this:
"The cryptocurrency guys, the ransomware guys, the phishing people. Criminal to criminal marketing in crimes-as-a-service is on the rise. A lot of them are being sold the vision of you can have a great life if you just buy our crime service and pay us a monthly fee."
Cigna CISO James Beeson agrees, and he told SecureWorld News that a low global standard of living and more of the world getting high-speed internet will continue to fuel cybercrime.
“If you’re making $10 a day and you can make more using malware-as-a-service, or a syndicated crime syndicate offers you $20 a day to help penetrate networks, what are you going to do?”
Hackers for hire examples
We've seen how this trend plays out, first hand, here at SecureWorld.
As you might imagine, we allow comments on our cybersecurity stories. However, we've had to block dozens of them over the last year because hackers are trying to use our cybersecurity articles to drum up business.
Here are some examples of hacking-for-hire
Our story, Instagram Hack: Unclear Picture of What's Happening, brought out cybercrime-as-a-service comments like this:
The story, New Warning About Hackers Stealing WhatsApp Accounts, brought out comments like this:
And here's another story we published that gained the attention of hackers wanting to reach their target market. The story was about people who were using a spouse checking app that got hacked.
Hacking crime groups advertising for more hackers
And it's not just individual criminals using a cybercrime-as-a-service model. Cyberscoop recently reported on The Dark Overlord hacking group and its Dark Web advertisement for more hackers with promises of earning $60,000 a month:
“Do YOU want to get Rich? Come work for us!,” The Dark Overlord wrote in a Nov. 14, 2018, thread on KickAss Forum, a cybercriminal marketplace on the dark web that charges for entry.
"You’ll be engaged in operations against various companies and governments and world-wide deployments. If you’re goal-oriented and used to objectives and achieving them, then you’re perfect for us.”
And these types of ads point to what cybersecurity teams are up against: A variety of tools and attack vectors with the same motivation as many physical crimes: money.
Wolfgang Goerlich sums it up quite well:
"If we don’t communicate... the bad guys are and they’re very efficient at it because they are heavily monetized to do so. So if we don’t communicate, they will—and we’ll lose. I believe it’s incumbent on everyone who does cybersecurity to take their knowledge and share it in their local channels.”
We could not agree more.
[RESOURCE: 2019 local cybersecurity conferences across North America]
