Serving the Underground Economy

US News | Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:47:47 am PST

Here’s a scary little story about the increasing sophistication of online criminals: Hands-off hackers: Crooks opt for surgical strikes.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Internet criminals have been getting more “professional” for years, trying to run their businesses like Big Business to get better and more profitable at selling stolen data online. Now the bad guys of the cyber-underworld are exhibiting other unexpected traits: remarkable patience and restraint in stalking their victims.

A new report by antivirus software vendor Symantec Corp. details a startling trend that highlights the inventive ways criminals are figuring out ways [sic] to make money online.

Hackers are sometimes breaking into online businesses and not stealing anything. Gone are the bull-in-the-China-shop days of plundering everything in sight once they’ve found a sliver of a security hole.

Instead of swiping all the customer data they can get their hands on, a small subset of hackers have concerned themselves with stealing only a very specific thing from the vendors they breach — they want access to the compromised companies’ payment-processing systems, and nothing else, according to the “Symantec Report on the Underground Economy,” slated for release Monday.

They use their illicit access to online payment gateways for only one purpose: to validate stolen credit card numbers. They sell this validation service to the criminals who actually buy lists of card numbers, so they can be sure the numbers they’re buying will work. It’s a kind of underground service industry.