BreachBytes

Yesterday, my BreachBytes co-author Andy wrote about the rise of organized crime in cybersecurity. It is an interesting and alarming trend that we have been discussing for quite some time at Packet Analytics. I have been watching a few developing stories on another trend in the hacker community: hacktivism. The Register reported yesterday on the RIAA website’s recent defacement problems and on the Church of Scientology’s DOS problems. Just this morning Rueters has a blurb about purported cyberattacks aimed at Panama by US hackers angry with the election of Pedro Miguel Gonzalez as the president of the Panamanian legislature (Gonzalez is a murder suspect in the US).

Reading, research and personal experience has led me to believe that modern hackers (I am not including whitehat hackers here — that’s another post) are motivated in one of three ways:

1. Bragging rights (traditional hackers, script kiddie)
2. Money (organized crime, identity thieves, scammers)
3. Ideology (hacktivists, spies)

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A quote by Gartner analyst John Pescatore in a recent article in PC World points out a fact that is becoming more and more common and is of grave concern to security experts:

“…government-funded cyber espionage is minimal in comparison to that carried out by criminals motivated to steal information for financial gain.”

Cybercrimes are no longer fashionable pranks by teenage hackers to get their name in the paper. Cybercrime is now being driven by financial gain and in many cases is the result of organized crime. The San Jose Mercury News did an excellent three-part series called “Ghosts in the Browser” which highlighted the rise of organized crime, particularly overseas, in the cyberworld.

What makes this so scary?

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