Five dollars for control over 1,000 compromised email accounts. Eight dollars for a distributed denial-of-service attack that takes down a website for an hour. And just a buck to solve 1,000 captchas.
Those are the going rates of cybercrime, the amounts criminals pay other criminals for the technical services necessary to launch attacks. It’s the kind of IT outsourcing no legitimate company would ever conduct, but it’s a profitable business if done effectively.
This criminal underground was detailed Wednesday in a highly entertaining talk given by researcher Stefan Savage at the annual Usenix technical conference in Portland, Ore. Outrageous examples of outsourced cybercrime drew laughter from the audience, but Savage also presented an empirical approach to researching computer crime and devising the most effective – meaning the most financially feasible – methods of stopping it — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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