The Underground Economy

Full Title of Reference

The Underground Economy: Priceless

Full Citation

Rob Thomas and Jerry Martin, The Underground Economy: Priceless, ;login:, Dec. 2006, at 7. Web

BibTeX

Categorization

Issues: Economics of Cybersecurity

Issues: Cybercrime

Key Words

underground economy, money, cash, statistics, criminal activity, crime, cybercrime, criminals, economics, monetize, cashiers, theft, IRC, prosecution

Synopsis

An analysis of the ways in which miscreants in the underground economy monetize stolen credit card data, bot networks, compromised hosts and other spoils of cybercrime.

The underground economy is fertile ground for the pursuit and prosecution of the miscreants. Most of the underground economy servers are public, advertised widely, and easy to find (standard IRC ports, very descriptive DNS RRs, etc.). There is absolutely no presumption of privacy in the underground economy; the channels aren’t hidden, the channels have no keys, and the servers have no passwords. There is evidence of physical crime as well as online crime, and admissions of guilt, and all are readily available. Although the data in this article is obfuscated, these stanzas of gross fraud come with the name, address, phone number, SSN, and mother’s maiden name of the victim. That seems ready-made for a complaint. It is time to use the miscreants’ greatest asset, the underground economy, against them.