Once a small island of technically skilled hobbyist perpetrators attaining little or no real-world earnings, online crime has since become a very lucrative means for professional fraudsters to earn profits that can be cashed out at the local Western Union office. Jason Franklin, Vern Paxson, Adrian Perrig and Stefan Savage recently spent seven months on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), tracking the traffic in credit card numbers, bank logins, botnets, phishing tools and similar commodities.
Analysing the 13 million public messages gathered (messaging between individual users was not included), their paper “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants” provides a fascinating view into this field of online crime. It should be compulsory reading for everyone involved with the anti-abuse aspects of information security.
What do you think about the report? Did anything in it surprise you? Please post your comments!
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