Fergie's Tech Blog

Simple Tactics Can Disrupt Internet Underground, Undermine Cyber Criminals

Thomas Claburn writes on InformationWeek:

To reduce cyber crime, the government may want to consider the tactics employed by the music industry against copyright scofflaws, suggests Jason Franklin, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Franklin has co-authored a paper with Adrian Perrig, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Vern Paxson, associate professor at University of California, Berkeley, and Stefan Savage, assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, which explores the underground hacker economy.

The paper [.pdf], "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants," measures and analyzes the Internet's black market for information. It is based on 7 months of observation, from January to August 2006, during which 2.4 Gbytes of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) data was logged. IRC is one of the main communication channels of cyber criminals who participate in credit card fraud, identity theft, spamming, and phishing.

The researchers saw over 87,000 credit card numbers traded during this time; they estimate that the total wealth generated from credit card fraud over IRC exceeded $37 million.

posted by Fergie @ 10/18/2007 03:31:00 PM