Underground Forum Taken Offline With Netizens Details Revealed

A hacker website pakbugs.com has been withdrawn from the Web, after white hat hackers broke in the forum, reported The Register on September 18, 2009. A previously unidentified group known as "War Against Cyber Crime" claimed credit for this hack.

The pakbugs.com report to full revelation made by 'War Against Cyber Crime' noted that these are mainly Pakistan-based and engaged in unlawful activities.

The report said that this list is inclusive of their users for law enforcement agencies to
scrutinize and take action wherever required. Presently, their website is hosted by the server of pacificcrack.com, as per the news published by SCMAGAZINE on September 18, 2009.

Chief Research Officer at security firm F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, stated that the web forum was an 'underground' forum where people, chiefly hackers with spiteful purposes, conferred hacking methods as well as sold malicious code, bank login details and stolen credit card numbers, as reported by SCMAGAZINE on September 18, 2009.

Mikko said that it seems someone attacked this forum and disclosed the results to the full
revelation mailing list. The pakbugs.com site is presently not available. He also added that they do not expect it to resume the services either.

This case demonstrates how such illegal activities are performed. Cyber crooks enter into an invitation-only Internet Relay Chat to do business with other people of the same profession (i.e. cybercriminals). They will usually establish a hacker channel for a just some days, do business and then take it out of the service to avoid being detected.

Security analyst said that it also shows that cybercrime has become a thriving underground business for experienced criminals, who buy and sell precious stolen monetary details from numerous innocent users every year in an online black market by using spiteful software and other malicious methods. Lastly, it is due to the competence of hackers into attacking several computers, numbering in thousands, every day, that the Internet crime industry has presently become a billion-dollar industry.

Related article: Unauthorized Patch by Researcher Posts Threat for Microsoft

» SPAMfighter News - 10/9/2009