DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [79]
The company was sending out rogue adware, which, once installed on an individual’s computer, would trigger a pop-up on the browser warning the user that their machine had been compromised by a virus. The only way, the advert explained, to rid their computer of the electronic critters now crawling all over their hard disk and RAM was to click on a link and purchase ‘Malware Destroyer 2009’, to name but one of their countless products.
Once you had downloaded Malware Destroyer (for €40), IM would instruct you to remove your existing anti-virus system, such as Norton, and install their product. Once installed, however, it did precisely nothing – it was an empty piece of software, although now of course you were open to infection by any passing virus and you had paid for that dubious privilege.
A researcher for McAfee in Hamburg, Dirk Kolberg, began to monitor this operation. He followed the scareware back to its source in East Asia and found that the administrator of IM’s servers had left some ports wide open, so Kolberg was at liberty to wander into the server and peruse it at will. What he uncovered was quite breathtaking. Innovative Marketing was making so much money that it had established three call centres – one for English speakers, one for German and one for French – to assist baffled customers who were trying to install their non-functioning products. Kolberg worked out from trawling through the receipts he also found on the server that the scareware scam had generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the management, in one of the most theatrical examples of Internet crime.
Beyond scareware, there are pump-and-dump schemes, which involve hackers moving into financial sites and digitally inflating share prices, before selling their holdings and then allowing the stock to collapse. There are also payroll schemes, whereby criminals hack into a corporation’s computer and add phantom employees to the personnel database. However, the hackers give these employees real salaries, which are dispatched monthly to so-called ‘money mules’. For a small consideration, these are instructed to pass on the money to a bank far away from where the crime is actually committed.
Just as the Web offers boundless possibilities to the creative mind in the licit world, so criminals can let their fantasies run free on the Internet.
The second major area of malfeasance on the Web is cyber industrial espionage. According to the annual threat report published by the American telecommunications giant, Verizon, this accounts for roughly 34 per cent of criminal activity on the Web and is almost certainly the most lucrative. Communications technology has made the theft of industrial secrets much easier than in the past. Until computers became widespread, stealing material involved physically breaking into a company or, if it were an inside job, finding ways of actually removing and distributing the data being sought.
No such difficulties now: industrial thieves can hack into a corporate system and then sniff around for blueprints, marketing strategies, payrolls or whatever else they are seeking, before downloading it. When Max Vision was not yet the fabled Iceman, he worked across the West Coast as a penetration tester – companies would pay him to attempt a digital break-in. Speaking to me in the orange jumpsuit that is his prison uniform, Vision said, ‘In those years, there was only one company which I failed to break into, and that was a major American pharmaceutical company.’ This is understandable – the value of pharmaceutical companies resides in their research, and the loss of formulae for new treatments can result in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars and the collapse