Industrial Cybercrime: Targeting Internet Hosting Services
Why go for thousand for small sites individually when you can after them all at once like an industrial fishing ship. That seems to be the reason behind attacks on hosting services. The latest one, this time against Layered Technologies, is reported by The Register :
The attack on Layered is part of a growing trend in cybercrime in which hackers target a single web host rather than the thousands of individual sites that that rely on it for service. In May, Brinkster.com required customers to change their login credentials after discovering many of them may have been compromised. Other hosts who have been penetrated include PlusNet and IPOWER.
It would seem that the cybercrime industry is bifurcated: there is the attack-the-unsecure-home-PC segment that goes after vulnerable Windows PCs and turns them into bots or infects them with keyloggers to steal bank account information; and then there is the segment that targets commercial and government operations, hacking databases, probing for vulnerabilities, disrupting operations with DDoS attacks (thanks to the botnets provided by the first segment), and either stealing data in bulk or going after targeted intellectual property.
I posted another comment today on comment on McAfee CEO David DeWalt's comment that cybercrime is now bigger than the drug trade. I'm thinking we're going to see more and more about the professionalization of cybercrime. At some point, we'll start to see the adoption of techniques that are used to combat professional, organized crime to how we control cybercrime.
Email This!
Digg it!
Sphere it!
Del.icio.us
Reddit!
Newsvine
