Crime shops selling stuff: this isn’t surprising,: hacked log ins anyone?

I guess this should probably go in to the “I am probably not surprised” category. Brian Krebs penned an article titled Crime Shop Sells Hacked Logins to Other Crime Shops which I recently read.

This probably doesn’t surprise me, as shops are always needy of data to sell, and some may have less than others.

Up for the “Most Meta Cybercrime Offering” award this year is Accountz Club, a new cybercrime store that sells access to purloined accounts at services built for cybercriminals, including shops peddling stolen payment cards and identities, spamming tools, email and phone bombing services, and those selling authentication cookies for a slew of popular websites.

This is just the first paragraph of this fascinating article. The second paragraph says:

Criminals ripping off other crooks is a constant theme in the cybercrime underworld; Accountz Club’s slogan  — “the best autoshop for your favorite shops’ accounts” — just normalizes this activity by making logins stolen from users of various cybercrime shops for sale at a fraction of their account balances.

The third even says:

The site says it sells “cracked” accounts, or those that used passwords which could be easily guessed or enumerated by automated tools. All of the credentials being sold by Accountz provide access to services that in turn sell access to stolen information or hijacked property, as in the case of “bot shops” that resell access to infected computers.

So we’ve got criminals ripping each other off to get the most bang out of their buck if you will by selling their most prized posession, the stolen data that makes them their money to begin with.

One example of this going on is known as the Genesis Market, where customers can search for such stolen data. I’ve linked to the market although it is a blog post elsewhere on the web.

The article is quite fascinating, and I hope that you take a look at this one. This may be where our next stolen data is off to, and we just don’t know it yet.

Great job, Brian, you did it again with this one.