Cupfighter.net

Subtitle: Why we should be fully-updated on this topic: InfoSec players, Finance world, citizens

Raoul is a member of UNICRI (http://www.unicri.it/), a United Nations crime and justice research institute.

Unicri research technology as well, because if normal people use technology, the bad guys use it as well.

“Every new technology opens the door to new criminal approaches”

In the 70s the first wave of hackers where searching for knowledge. In the early 80s the second wave of hackers was driven by curiosity. The third wave of hackers in the 90s where eager to hack and started to exchange information. The first communities where created. The current fourth wave is now driven by anger and money. Hacking has met politics (hacktivism) and money (cybercrime).

Why is cybercrime on the rise?
1)    There are more and more targets, thanks to broadband
2)    A need to make money, think economical crisis
3)    Hacking got easier, 0-day attacks and skimmers can be easily bought online.
4)    Fall guys are easy to recruit, e.g. for money laundering
5)    The criminals think they cannot be caught
6)    There is no violence, no need to face your victims

Hackers are no longer part of the ICT community, they are in it for the money and are professionals, but the media image of ciber criminals is still the old hacker image. Sometimes today the hackers are the good guys and the professionals are the bad guys.

Some numbers on cybercrime:
•    285 millions records compromised in 2008
•    $2,000,000,000 yearly turnover of RBN
•    148% increasing in ATM fraud

RBN is the Russian Business Network, its basically the ISP for cybercrime, they offer hosting and good bandwidth to those running a criminal enterprise on the web. It will give user anonymity and interaction with “like souls”.

Underground economy is the mechanism to clean money. Stealing money is easy, using that money is not so. Therefore any cybercriminal needs to set up a money laundering operation.

It is an organized enterprise.
Hackers, coders and scammers get the money for the boss and the mules make the money clean for him. Underground economy is everything from trading stolen information and good, the services needed to get them and the services to clean the money.

So how does this economy work?

In order to trade goods (CCV codes, cards, credentials, identities) on online forums you have to be approved by the organization that runs the forum
Fake credit cards are of  high quality and look very legitimate?
On line checks give full details of card holders for card production.

www.darkmarket.ws was run by two business mans. ChaO was arrested, but has been for years one of the biggest sellers of ATM skimmers. His villa, with personal swimming pool, contained a hologram printer, 10 boxes of skimmers and lots of fake cards.

These guys live in luxury.