Interviews

Cybercrime-as-a-service

by Mark Rowe

Legitimate SMEs must steer clear of illegal traders, writes Raj Samani, VP Chief Technology Officer at McAfee EMEA. He speaks of the illicit world of cybercrime traders.

The word cybercriminal has long been associated with the image of the technical genius in solitude to develop complex, destructive code. However, while researching for the whitepaper ‘Cybercrime Exposed’, we found that in some cases the truth is far more threatening than the stereotype. In reality, there is a whole network of underworld cybercriminals working together to make a lucrative trade from their illegal services. Not only are these cybercrime traders sophisticated business owners in their own right, many are exploiting the vulnerabilities of legitimate small businesses to promote their illegal services.

What is cybercrime trading?

Just as legitimate business owners are increasingly offering their expertise via the cloud, so too have cybercriminals begun offering their illicit skills remotely. While the term ‘as-a-service’ normally refers to services including ‘software-as-a-service’, ‘infrastructure-as-a-service’ and ‘platform-as-a-service’, illegal traders have started to offer ‘cybercrime-as-a-service’.

With criminal expertise now readily available online, even the least tech-savvy can gain access to sensitive data such as bank credentials, credit card data, and login details, while people with a grudge to bear, such as ex-employees, are able to pay to outsource a business-damaging attack. These services take the following forms:

• Research-as-a-service: Criminals offer services that support a potential cyber attack, for example the sale of huge lists of email addresses that can be filtered based on geographic region, or even profession.

• Crimeware-as-a-Service: This incorporates the identification and development of the exploits used for the intended attack. This ranges from developing code to gain access to websites, to checking illegal files against a range of security software and revealing which security protection is vulnerable to an attack. This particular service also includes translation services, so that criminals can scam victims in foreign countries.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service: For this service, criminals hire out the infrastructure necessary for an attack. This ranges from renting out a whole network of infected computers, known as a botnet, to leasing out platforms that enable attacks, such as mail relays that facilitate unsolicited emails.

• Hacking-as-a-Service: Data thieves or people with a particular vendetta quite simply pay a professional to hack into a computer or a number of computers.

SME vulnerabilities

One of the biggest difficulties for small online businesses is getting noticed in a crowded market place. Cybercriminals have the same issue of needing to appeal to the market, with the added barrier of operating in the illegal underworld. As a result, many cybercrime traders are hijacking the forums and comment sections of small business websites to promote their own illicit trade and, in some cases, even selling their black market services directly through SMEs’ open marketplace or ecommerce sites. Taking advantage of the fact that many small business owners forget to monitor these easily-accessed areas of their websites, cybercrime traders are ensuring that anyone who searches online for these illegal services will find exactly what they are looking for on small business websites. While it is good news for cybercrime traders that these brazen adverts are available to the wider public, this means that potential customers for the small business may see the posts and be deterred from the legitimate site as a result.

Adding insult to injury, while blackening the name of the legitimate SME host site and relying on its resources for their own benefit, cybercrime-as-a-service traders make big money for themselves. The whitepaper uncovered a number of lucrative deals, such as the sale of credit card details for £65 each and email addresses for entire geographic regions for £570. But among the most financially beneficial illicit trades revealed by the paper was research-as-a-service, with Apple iOS exploits selling for as much as £160,000.

Taking charge of your own site

When it comes to shopping online, customers are faced with an increasing number of options. All it takes is a slight doubt as to the legitimacy of the site and many would rather play it safe and choose from one of many other shopping channels. While you may be offering a perfectly safe and reliable service, cybercrime-traders can tarnish this image with their black market adverts.

As a first step, ensure that you have a company-wide security policy that is clearly communicated to your employees. If these traders will sell others’ data from your site, they are likely to look out for any easily-accessible customer data or business IP they can lay their hands on, so keep it secure. Once the right protection is place, it is time to take back control of your own site. Make it a rule that open forums, comment sections and review areas are checked regularly for these business-damaging deals and remove any that may appear. Customers will decide in seconds whether they trust your site enough to make a purchase, so don’t let cybercrime traders get rich while destroying your small business.

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