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Hackers Use Corporate Tactics

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Bloomberg News

Published: September 18, 2007

Computer hackers are adopting corporate strategies for online crime, selling toolkits to help thieves steal data and put it up for sale in an 'underground economy,' a security report released Monday states.
Cybercriminals are offering professionally developed software to distribute malicious code to computers, according to the study by Symantec Corp., the biggest maker of security software. Before, hackers sought to crash computer systems and gain status among their colleagues.

There is 'a significant shift in attackers motivated from fame to fortune,' Arthur Wong, a senior vice president at Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec, says in the report, which examined trends from the first six months of the year.

Almost $200 million in online fraud occurred last year in the United States, where one-third of all attacks took place, according to data from the FBI. The most common information stolen included credit card and bank account information, Symantec's report states.

About 58 percent of businesses expected major data loss at least once every five years, Symantec says.

'You trade credit card numbers, eBay accounts,' said Marty Lindner, a senior technical staff member at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburgh. 'You get someone's user name and password, it's now a tradable commodity.'

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