The World’s Top 5 Cybercrime Hotspots A Russian crime ring is suspected of obtaining access to a record 1.2 billion username and password combinations, shedding renewed light on how vulnerable online personal information can be. Cybersecurity firm Hold Security said the gang of hackers was based in a city in south central Russia and comprised roughly ten men in their twenties who were all personally acquainted with each other, the New York Times reported. Russia Crime syndicates in Russia use some of the most technologically advanced tools in the trade, according to Sherry. “The Russians are at the top of the food chain when it comes to elite cyberskill hacking capabilities,” he says. Even before the latest revelations of stolen online records, the United States charged a Russian man, Evgeniy Bogachev, of participating in a large-scale operation to infect hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. The massive data breach of the retailer Target last year has also been traced to Eastern Europe China China is considered to be another stalwart hotbed for hackers, though the spotlight has primarily fallen not on gangs of criminals, but on the Chinese government, which has been linked to economic and political espionage against the U.S. In May, the Justice Department moved to charge five Chinese government officials with orchestrating cyberattacks against six major U.S. companies. Brazil Sherry calls Brazil “an emerging cybercrime economy.” Cybercriminals there and across South America are increasingly learning from their counterparts in Eastern Europe via underground forums. They’ll also pay for Eastern European tools to use in their own attacks, using highly complex Russian-made software that Sherry says can include millions of lines of code. That black market has become so sophisticated that Eastern European hackers now provide I.T. support for customers buying their malware, according to Sherry. So far, most of the attacks that originate in Brazil target local individuals and firms, including the recently reported cybertheft of billions of dollars from an online payment system. “The question is, when will that change?” says Jim Lewis, a senior fellow at the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Nigeria The original home of low-tech scam emails remains a key player in underground cyber activity and has become a destination for international cybercrime syndicates, according to Sherry. Authorities in Nigeria and other African countries have been slow to crackdown on scammers and hackers, even as more people connect to the Internet. “It’s proving to be a very comfortable environment for cybercriminals to set up shop, operate, and carry out their illegal activities,” Sherry says. Recent efforts by President Jonathan Goodluck to legislate cybercrime in Nigeria have served to push some of the activity into other countries in the region, such as Ghana. Vietnam Tech firms in Southeast Asia have a long history of working with Western software firms and other tech companies, Sherry says, meaning there is a broad base of tech expertise there. “People who are really good software engineers, those people are going to be naturals when it comes to taking off the ‘white hat’ and putting on the ‘black hat,’ Sherry says. In Vietnam, where the I.T. industry has expanded at a rapid rate in the last decade, a hacker allegedly masterminded the theft of up to 200 million personal records in the U.S. and Europe that included Social Security numbers, credit card data and bank account information. The communist government there has also been recruiting local hackers to spy on journalists, dissidents, and activists, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Based on Time reports.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 08:43:17 +0000
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