A Look Inside the Bustling Cybercrime Marketplace

wiredmikey writes "Cybercrime's underground activity, much like a Middle Eastern bazaar, is a loud and boisterous market. Buying, selling, haggling and cheating all take place in these marketplaces. Each marketplace houses other specialized-markets of illegitimate goods. There's the credit cards market, the bot rental market, another one for viruses, and one more for the credentials – to name a few. The column discusses how cybercriminals communicate, how these markets operate and how hacker transactions are being performed."

Fluff Article

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'article' is horrible and pointless. I can summarise everything that has been said in one sentence.

Criminals use IRC, IM, Forums and Social Networking to communicate.

The information about payment methods is vague to the point of irrelevance. Stop putting this sort of fluff on the front page to fill in space and actually put up a real article for once.

One-line summary.

[CriminalNerd]

Here, I'll summarize it for you:

"Cybercriminals" use: Underground Forums, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, Instant Messaging (IM), and Social Networks. And they use Russian versions of Paypal for payments.

That's the whole of the article. In the next column, she's going to talk about what goods cybercriminals trade for money.

The IRC channel is analogous to an exclusive party where matches as well as transactions all occur within a specific IRC channel.
She could've just called it a private chatroom and skip writing the entire paragraph.

And who is surprised?

[PerformanceDude]

Most cyber-crime these days is perpetrated by paid professionals and in some cases backed by very wealthy crime syndicates and even protected by corrupt government officials (I'm not going to name anyone here, but since this is mostly Russian/former east block in origin, I'm sure the average Slashdotter can figure it out). The idea of the lone hacker sitting in his bedroom doing evil is just stupid. Phishing, ID scams, ATM skimmer production etc., are all well funded and highly professional activities. So who is surprised that they trade online? When was the last time you heard about any major conviction in a Russian jurisdiction? To them it is just business, so of course they transact on the internet too...