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The New Hacker Economics
Posted Date: 08 May 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: News
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Posted By: vijay kumar Member Level: Diamond
Rating:  Points: 3
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To make money, you have to move up the economic food chain into higher-value, more profitable work and markets. That economic fact of life applies to nations, companies and individuals.
A study released this week shows how this natural law is being applied in the subculture of criminal computer hackers. Pilfered credit card numbers and bank account PIN numbers have become commodities on shadowy Web sites where stolen digital information is bought and sold.
Company e-mail, business documents and personal health information are the new targets of choice for illegal hackers, according to Finjan, a San Jose-based maker of Web security software and appliances.
In its report, Finjan said its researchers found a single server that housed a hefty pile of business and personal information stolen from 40 companies around the world.
To be sure, computer security companies are in the business of not only finding but also marketing security risks. But the Finjan research is intriguing because it seems to point to an evolution in illicit computer hacking.
The pilfered data that Finjan found, said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, the company’s chief technology officer, provides a large yet representative portrait of the information criminals are seeking and obtaining these days.
“Money is the motivation for criminal hackers, and it is this kind of information that has become most valuable,” he said.
A couple of years ago, credit card numbers and bank account PINs sold for $100 or more on sites selling stolen information, Mr. Ben-Itzhak said. Now, the price is down to $10 or $20, compared to $150 to $200 for some of the newer documents.
The patient records, he said, were apparently plucked from personal computers in doctors’ offices at what he would only identify as an “organization” on the East Coast of the United States.
Finjan reported the data breach both to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the implementation of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
The server the Finjan researchers found was in Malaysia, though the person responsible could have been controlling it from anywhere, said Mr. Ben-Itzhak.
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