An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants

Full Citation

Jason Franklin, Vern Paxson, Stefan Savage, Adrian Perrig, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), ACM, November, 2007. Web AltWeb

BibTeX

Categorization

Issues: Economics of Cybersecurity

Issues: Economics of Cybercrime

Key Words

Association for Computing Machinery, security, sales channel, sales, phishing, Internet, identity theft, hacking, financial services, credit card, malware, economics, security

Synopsis

This paper studies an active underground economy which specializes in the commoditization of activities such as credit card fraud, identity theft, spamming, phishing, online credential theft, and the sale of compromised hosts. Using a seven month trace of logs collected from an active underground market operating on public Internet chat networks, we measure how the shift from “hacking for fun” to “hacking for profit” has given birth to a societal substrate mature enough to steal wealth into the millions of dollars in less than one year.