Want to hack your ex-spouse’s cellphone? Steal the private passwords to get dirt on your annoying neighbors? How about disrupting your business competitor’s operation, perhaps by shutting down its online network or holding data for ransom?
All of these activities are illicit and malicious, but a growing cadre of professional “black hat” hackers are providing their services to all comers. These “retail” activities, often run by sophisticated criminal networks and individuals, appear to be on the rise. Instead of offering their services in the shadows of the dark web, however, many are hanging their shingles up in plain sight, just an online search away. But they come with a caveat to the crooked emptor – the real target for these hackers is often the people who hire them.
Although precise figures on this latest form of e-commerce are unavailable, experts say the combination of the pandemic, millions of people working from home and widespread online commerce has provided countless opportunities for hackers and cyberthieves of all stripes. “Phishing” and “pharming,” where cyberthieves use false identities to steal personal information such as bank and credit card account information, accounted for 33% of all cybercrime in the U.S. last year, according to SEON, a company specializing in anti-fraud systems. That one crime category has more than twice the victim count — 241,342 victims — of the next-highest consumer crime (non-payment/non-delivery). This global wave of fraud and cyber disruption is relentless and ongoing. The company estimates that e-commerce retailers alone are hit with an average 206,000 web-based attacks per month.
Deep, often personalized hacks target individuals and go beyond the standard cybercrime fare of stealing identity information to access credit card and bank accounts. The cybersecurity firm Atlas VPN, in a recent survey of hackers for hire on the dark web, found a laundry list of nefarious services on offer:
- Spear-phishing attacks cost anywhere between $100 and $1,000. These are targeted attempts to steal passwords, account numbers and other personal information used by scammers.
- Hackers charge just over $300 per month to send a barrage of denial of service (DoS) attacks to a specific network (which disrupt and possibly shut down the networks).
- Hackers for hire cost $250 per job (for a variety of services).
- Ransomware costs as little as $66 per “kit.” (They provide the code; you send it out.)
While individual hackers have been out there for years, it’s believed many now collaborate with larger, organized cybercriminal groups.
“Innovative hacking technologies have been mostly developed by large hacker groups,” noted a spokesperson for Atlas VPN. “Smaller groups or individual hackers do not have enough resources to develop …….