I was right!

Allen does the dance-of-I-was-right...

*ahem*

In my blog in July, I predicted that we would be seeing a perfect storm as cyber criminals start to see diminshing returns on PII (credit card info, mothers maiden names and the kind of things they have been going after up until now) and thus start looking at the business information that they have been ignoring.

According to usatoday, internet thieves are making big money stealing corporate info.

"Elite cybergangs can no longer make great money stealing and selling personal identity data. Thousands of small-time, copycat data thieves have oversaturated the market, driving prices to commodity levels. Credit card account numbers that once fetched $100 or more, for instance, can be had for $10 or less, says Gunter Ollmann, chief security strategist at IBM ISS, IBM's tech security division."

As I said in my original article - the only problem with this is the establishment of a market. The cyber-criminals have established a very viable underground trading system but they now need businessed to want to dip their toes in something that is highly illegal. It seems this is happening.

The scary thing is how much information is actually being pulled out of the organisation. The criminals are literally dumping everyone's My Documents directory with no real aim to a storage facility outside of the organisation and yet the companies are not aware of this.

My advice? Take measures now while the enemy are just getting established. How you manage to protect your employees' and customers' PII will determine how well you survive the next part of the battle - your company secrets.

Also, don't be tempted to get information on your competitors from shady people. They may just be doing the same thing to you.

PS1: (PII = personally identifiable information - anything that can be linked to a person and is usually stuff you don't want the public to know like your credit card details, address, salary, health, etc)

PS2: Thank you to TaoSecurity for the story. Read Richard Bejtlich's post for more information. His take on the story is that it is all to do with money. Of course it is, if you think information security is about antivirus and firewalls then you are truely wrong.

The Perfect Storm

Its time to get your raincoats and lifeboats - the perfect storm is finished brewing - it is about to rain down upon us.

This may sound dramatic but I think that I may not be conveying the amount of pain that Information Security is about to receive. We will certainly have to step up our game.

Symantec and Verizon have done some interesting research into the underground hacker community and their findings are rather interesting. A bit scary too.

There is an entire community of totally different players that all work together to get from the point where a nerdy kid finds a vulnerability to where a hacker uses that to get into a PC, steal personal information and credit card details, sell them or use them and move on.

So far, it seems, that the community has been quite lazy and have just discarded company information to get to the credit card information and personal information (ID numbers, social security numbers, addresses etc).

This has provided us in Information Security with a perfect opportunity. We have been able to observe how hackers work while they have been taking information that is not our own. Companies that have credit card information have been the ones that were most under attack but those that don't handle credit card information have largely been ignored by hackers except for some members of staff who have been caught out but then they have only lost their own personal information.

There just really isn't a (black/underground) market for information that is not credit card or personal finance related.

However, it was always my feeling that the credit card/personal finance market would become saturated at some stage and the loosely-bound-but-still-very-organised-and-co-ordinated underground market would start to look elsewhere.

Essentially, the infrastructure is there for wide-scale information theft but the will wasn't there. I have thought this for a while my question was always - when will the will be there? When will Jack-the-hacker decide that credit card theft is no longer worth his time and start to deal in company information ?

Adrian Lane from Securosis thinks that the falling prices in the underground economy is humorous. I disagree. I look at it as very scary and the final puzzle-piece.

I think that the perfect storm is about to be unleashed.