Hackers Becoming Industrialized: Imperva

On March 1, 2010, the leader in data security, Imperva, came up with a new report cautioning that hackers have become industrialized and pose a tremendously higher danger to organizations, government and individuals.

Security researchers at Imperva opined that hacking alone constitutes a $1 Trillion industry at present - representing a significant increase from just a few billion in 2007. Industrialization is the sole reason behind this swift growth.

Imperva has found a latest hacker scheme as an instance of this 'industrial revolution'. The scheme is attacking educational servers across the globe through Viagra ads that hit Web users with malware as they visit infected page on some authentic education website.

Chief Technology Officer at Imperva, Amichai Shulman, stated that the attack on educational institutions show the industrialization of hacking, attacking servers from institutions ranging from UC Berkeley and Ohio State to the University of Oxford, as per the news published by infosecurity.com on March 1, 2010.

Key discoveries of the report contain the assertion that a clear description of responsibilities and roles has come up within the hacking group over the years to develop a supply chain that looks like a drug cartel. In industrialized hacking industry of the present day, the classification of labour is as follows - Researchers, Farmers, Dealers and Technical innovators.

The chief job of a researcher is to find vulnerabilities in frameworks, applications and products and impart their knowledge to maliciously intended organizations for moneymaking. Similarly, the job of a framer includes maintaining and increasing the botnets' presence in cyberspace by means of mass infection.

Dealers are given the job of distributing harmful payloads and hacking methods, which were once regarded as cutting-edge and executed by technical innovators only. These are now incorporated into software tools available for installation.

This is the most frequently used technique for spreading bots. Basically, hackers promote Web-link references to already infected pages by compromising authentic websites with hidden references to infected Web pages and by leaving comment spam in the online forums. Users mistakenly visit these websites and consequently get their PCs infected.

Moreover, modern day industrialized hackers can also input a variety of URLs and acquire improperly protected confidential details.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 3/8/2010