US Cyber Criminal Underground a Shopping Free-For-All (csoonline.com) 81
itwbennett writes: According to a new report by Trend Micro, the North American cyber criminal underground has "[essentially] become a gun show for everyone as long as they can participate and are willing to pay," said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro. Their research revealed that 15% of underground sites sell offer crimeware and allow criminals to buy a variety of malware and hacking services, such as crypting. It's the hottest-selling item, other than drugs, said Kellermann. In case you're wondering, murder for hire sites make up just 1% of the underground mall.
So only certain types of hacks are sold? (Score:4, Insightful)
>> has become a gun show
So...only "small arm", non-automated hacks are for sale then?
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for that you have to go to the big players like the US and Chinese govt's per norm.
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Re: So only certain types of hacks are sold? (Score:1)
The proper term is semi automatic hacks. In the state of New York you are limited to 10 hacks per tcp connection before you have to disconnect and reconnect.
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Do you have to re-crimp new CAT-6 every time in California or is there a special tool that locks the cable in and you have to press a recessed button in order to remove the cable before you can reinsert a new one?
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More like a church bizarre.
Law Enforcement? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Law Enforcement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't making it easy for cybercriminals to find your business also make it easy for law enforcement to find your business?
Not if you pay with Bitcoin and download with Tor. Do you really think they pay with a Visa card, and have FedEx deliver a CDROM to the billing address?
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bitcoin blockchain (Score:3)
Not if you pay with Bitcoin
Except that, with the bitcoin protocole, every single transation is broadcast to the whole network (on purpose, that's the way it works without a central authority.
And eventually, the guy will want to actually spend them. These bitcoins arent going to sit collecting dust.
Which means either using them to pay for something (and thus sending them to a payment processor) or exchange them (and thus sending them to an online exchange platform).
And these sites (exchage and payment processors) are require by law (l
Bitcoin anonymity (Score:2)
It's common to just trade the bitcoins for cash,
Either you do it on a small scale (as do normal people, and which would be of limited use for a criminal earning a LOT of BTC money).
Or you need to constantly exchange huge wads of cash (so you need to find a neighbourhood with HIGH needs for bitcoins, and trade a LOT of money which is bound to attract the curiosity of law enforcement and/or tax services)
Remember the discussion is not about "how can I anonymously trade my 0.03 BTC ?" the discussion is about criminals whose main source of revenue is in BTC a
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Which means either using them to pay for something (and thus sending them to a payment processor)
You can make purchases with Bitcoin without going through any payment processor. Sure, a lot of sites use BitPay or Coinbase or similar, but there are some that accept bitcoins directly. For that matter, not all of the ones that do use a payment processor require any personally-identifying information, particularly for online services or digital goods. (Obviously if you need something shipped to you, that isn't going to be very anonymous.) The payment processor itself doesn't collect any of this information
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Still basically it is nothing but script kiddies for profit. The coders and distributors try to make as much money as possible out of idiot amateurs and it is the idiots who get caught and provide cover for the coders and distributors activities. Nothing new just another investigatory frothing beat up for, we need more money and power now. One second the biggest culprits are other governments, then it is terrorists and then it is back to organised crime. Personally I am waiting for the alien hackers threat
Any proof murder for hire is a real thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
About the only time I ever hear about contract killings is when people get arrested trying to hire somebody to commit murder on their behalf. It never works, they always seem to get caught. As they say, good help is hard to find.
Have there been any actual killings attributed to a murder for hire website? It sounds like a scam.
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I don't know. I spent the last 4 years looking for my ex-wife's killer. Nobody would take the job.
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About the only time I ever hear about contract killings is when people get arrested trying to hire somebody to commit murder on their behalf. It never works, they always seem to get caught.
If "it works" then you don't hear about it. There is just a dead body, and nobody knows who killed them or why. Often, there isn't even a body. There are thousands of unsolved murders every year, and many more people that go missing.
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There are thousands of unsolved murders every year, and many more people that go missing.
I hear that "thousands of unsolved murders" but how many are there really? I believe there are a fair amount of murders that go unsolved, but aren't most of these like gang killings or something? The kind of deal where some guy is found shot dead in a shitty part of town -- the cops don't know who the trigger is, but through gang intelligence they have a pretty decent idea what group killed him and often a fair guess (they can't prove in court) who the trigger probably was.
Actual disappearances that are n
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Not sure about in the US, but back when I was in Thailand in the early 90s, I remember a Bangkok Post feature article that interviewed a number of "hit men". It seemed fairly legit, even if the stories were embellished. Most of it was centered around the regional drug trade. Of every newspaper article I've read, that's one I wish I'd kept. It was one part John Woo, one part local news investigative reporting.
Here's a recent article about one being captured: http://www.bangkokpost.com/pri... [bangkokpost.com]
Of course, I doub
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I'd like to mention.. (Score:1)
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You left out Google, Boeing, IBM, probably more I can't think of at the moment.
Re:I'd like to mention.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well the moral of the story here is you should not pass laws you can't enforce you should not outlaw things people generally don't see as terribly objectionable.
Letting people use apps t get rides and paying people to take them places in cars does not offend anyone other than rent seeking cabbies. The result is you get a general public that breaks the law. Ditto for soft drugs like weed, gambling, more discrete prostitution eg call girls who do happy endings, etc.
Other people see people they know and respect being scoff laws and respect for the law is lost. After that its only short mental leap to 'i probably won't get caught so what the hell' and that is why we can't have nice things.
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So in other words, you're against personal choices and in favor of government forcing you to subsidize special interests against your will? Doesn't sound like "freedom" to me.
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It happens all over.. prescription meds, buildings, power grids, city planning, etc etc Nothing new. It's called civilized society.
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It offends me. It offends me because I live in a city where I know I can go to the nearest hotel if I need a cab, something I will not be able to do when they are gone.
First, only the largest major hotels in the largest US cities have cabs waiting and/or continuously picking up & dropping fares. You'd have to hope the clerk doesn't tell you to leave the property if you simply walked in and asked them to call a cab for you as a non-guest, in most places.
Second, why would you assume all the existing taxi companies would disappear? Having to actually compete, some will surely fail, but it's not a given that would be equally true for every taxi company. The ones that offe
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Because you're allowing a company to ignore the laws that hold their market together. No enforcement, no laws. No laws, no market. No market, no taxis. that much is pretty clear, actually
Why should people of limited mobility only have 'special' services to use? A lot of government agencies only support the vary disabled. There is a whole group in the spectrum in between that should not be taking resources from the ones
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Well the moral of the story here is you should not pass laws you can't enforce you should not outlaw things people generally don't see as terribly objectionable.
Letting people use apps t get rides and paying people to take them places in cars does not offend anyone other than rent seeking cabbies. The result is you get a general public that breaks the law. Ditto for soft drugs like weed, gambling, more discrete prostitution eg call girls who do happy endings, etc.
Other people see people they know and respect being scoff laws and respect for the law is lost. After that its only short mental leap to 'i probably won't get caught so what the hell' and that is why we can't have nice things.
That's insightful? You can't enforce laws against murder - you can only punish after the fact and then only if there's evidence to do so. So we shouldn't have laws that make murder illegal? That's not so insightful, I think.
Laws have never been about stopping anything. They've been about establishing punishment for what is deemed harmful behavior by the powers that made those laws.
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Which is why we shouldn't be passing unenforceable laws in the first place. If we didn't have the taxi monopolies and the laws supporting them, Uber and Lyft wouldn't be such a big deal because we would already have large numbers of small companies. But by passing first the monopolistic taxi laws and then passing more laws to try and regulate Uber and Lyft, you're pretty much ensuring that onl
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Those aren't really "taxis" but minibuses, like you find in many third world nations. And the problem isn't with lack of regulation, it's with lack of enforcement of criminal law (or alternative private mechanisms).
It's also hard to say whether the current situation is worse than the original situation. After all, large numbers of people are transported by the current system,
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Uber and Lyft are perfectly legal. Your mistake is thinking that taxi laws apply to them; they don't. They don't have taximeters, and therefore are not taxis. They're limosines, and operate under those laws.
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you lefties are a riot. Equating murder for hire with taxi services is the mark of crazy.
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Yeah, but it's the left that's been anti uber/lyft. You can bitch about uber's pricing but it's not like taxi service hasn't been a ripoff. Some competition should help settle market prices. Look what lack of competition did to the american car market. There's a reason americans buy foreign, and why detroit is now a hellhole. Competition is a needed element to keep businesses limber. Otherwise, they turn into bloated, inefficient monopolies like any other state service.
Part of the problem of 'living wage'
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Laws and regulation != competition. Therefore what is being charged isn't necessarily represented by what the market will bear. This leads to crazy fares. Of course, that's ok, but when uber does it, it's the end of the world, right? There's nothing special about transportation services that requires 'medallions' and artificial exclusivity.
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What is "crypting"? (Score:1)
What is it?
Re:What is "crypting"? (Score:5, Informative)
But the bad guys didn’t exactly take this innovation laying down; rather, they responded with their own innovations. What they came up with is known as the “crypting” service, a service that has spawned an entire industry that I would argue is one of the most bustling and lucrative in the cybercrime underground today.
Put simply, a crypting service takes a bad guy’s piece of malware and scans it against all of the available antivirus tools on the market today — to see how many of them detect the code as malicious. The service then runs some custom encryption routines to obfuscate the malware so that it hardly resembles the piece of code that was detected as bad by most of the tools out there. And it repeats this scanning and crypting process in an iterative fashion until the malware is found to be completely undetectable by all of the antivirus tools on the market.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag... [krebsonsecurity.com]
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Nice analogy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nice analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
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At least we know (Score:2)
Well, sure. There aren't that many FBI agents.
gun show (Score:5, Informative)
That quote is ridiculous. Anybody who's ever been to a gun show can tell you it's one of the safest most orderly mass congregations of people you'll ever have the pleasure of attending. The stuff that's for sale adheres to strict local, state, and federal laws. And there is no tolerance by the show management, attendees, or other vendors of shenanigans.
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That quote is ridiculous. Anybody who's ever been to a gun show can tell you it's one of the safest most orderly mass congregations of people you'll ever have the pleasure of attending. The stuff that's for sale adheres to strict local, state, and federal laws. And there is no tolerance by the show management, attendees, or other vendors of shenanigans.
six people shot in one week at gun shows [thinkprogress.org].
That's just one example. Googling "man shot gun show" yields a veritable treasure-trove of examples of accidental d
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Ok, problem with the story. Do you know anything about guns? At all? It says he slid the 25 caliber pistol's slide back. Well if he did that, it can't shoot. As soon as the slide moves it disables striking or it will blow up were the cartridge to go off.
BTW, did you know I'm a French Model?
Must be, you read it on the Internet. Bon Jour!
What do they think goes on at gun shows? (Score:3, Insightful)
The authors have no clue about gun shows. Almost every gun show I have visited had a cop at the front door, and I have been to a lot of gun shows.
Since the authors of this story imply that gun shows are places where lots of illegal guns are sold to criminals, I wonder how well they understand criminals. Probably not very well.
It's time to take note of their names and remember to search for them monthly for a few decades. This ridiculous misunderstanding of criminality will be very useful in discrediting them for decades to come.
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Two tickets.. (Score:2)
Sweet! Now when I flex my pale muscles to pickup chicks I can ask them if they want two tickets to the _cyber_ gun show!
And again, you fail at the summary (Score:1)
Wow a free for all? (Score:2)
Cyber (Score:2)
Sorry, whenever I see the word "cyber" in an article, I know it's crap and stop reading. Doesn't matter whether it's about cybernetics or the "US cyber underground".