The Underground Economy's Supply of Goods

Symantec (SYMC) just released their latest Internet Security Threat Report, a 104 pages of rich on graphs observations, according to the data streaming from their sensor network :

"Volume XI includes a new category: “Underground Economy Servers”. These are used by criminals and criminal organizations to sell stolen information, including government-issued identity numbers, credit cards, bank cards and personal identification numbers (PINs), user accounts, and email address lists. To reduce facilitating identity theft, organizations should take steps to protect data stored on or transmitted over their computers. It is critical to develop and implement encryption to ensure that any sensitive data is protected from unauthorized access."

In between their coverage on various segments such as vulnerabilities, phishing, spam, and yes malware despite that I'm having my doubts on SMTP as the major propagation vector on a worldwide scale, I came across to a nice figure summarizing their encouterings while browsing around various forums and web sites.

The question is - why are these underground goods cheaper than a Kids' menu at McDonalds as I've once pointed out at O'Reilly's Radar post on spamonomics? Because in 2007 we can easily speak of "malicious economies of scale" thus, profit margin gains despite the ongoing zero day vulnerabilities cash bubble at certain forums, doesn't seem to be that very important. So can we therefore conclude that greed isn't the ultimate driving force, but trying to get rid of the stolen information in the fastest way possible in between taking into consideration its dissapearing exclusiveness with each and every minute? The principle goes that a dollar earned today is worth more than a dollar earned tomorrow, but how come? Simple, by tomorrow the exclusiveness of your goods might by just gone, because the affected parties detected the leaks and took actions to prevent the damage.

Issues to keep in mind regarding the graph:
- Harvested spam databases have been circulating around for years and so turned into a commodity, for instance, I often come across geographically segmented databases or per email provider segmented ones, not for sale, but for free. So how come the "good" is offered for free? It's obviously fine for the "good" to be offered for free when there's a charge for service, the service of verifying the validity of the emails, the service of encoding the message in a way to bypass anti spam filters, and the service of actually sending the messages

- Where's the deal of a malicious party when selling an online banking account with a $9,900 balance for just $300? For me, it's a simple process of risk-forwarding to a party that is actually capable of getting hold of the cash

- Yahoo and Hotmail email cookies per piece? Next it will be an infected party's clickstream for sale, and you'll have the malicious parties competing with major ISPs who are obviously selling yours for the time being.

- Compromised computers per piece? Not exactly. Entire botnets or the utilization of the possible services offered on demand for a price that's slightly a bit higher than the one pointed out here.

Psychological imagation is just as important as playing a devil's advocate to come up with scenario building tactics in order to protect your customers and yourself from tomorrow's threats.

Related images:
- surveying potential buyers of zero day vulnerabilities in order to apply marginal thinking in their proposition
- advertisement for selling zero day vulnerabilities
- listing of available exploits
- zero day vulnerabilities shop, I'm certain it's a PHP module that's currently hosted somewhere else
- the WebAttacker toolkit
- The RootLauncher
- The Nuclear Grabber and geolocated infections-- site dissapeared already

Subconscious Search Monopoly Sentiments

And hey, that's from someone attending the Microsoft MVP for N-th time :

"I was invited to attend the Microsoft MVP Summit last week. If you want to know what the Summit is about or what a MS MVP is, Google is your friend."

Microsoft's MVP is a great corporate citizenship tool, whereas empowering and crediting the individual on a wide scale compared to internal reputation benchmarking is an indirect use of the "act as an owner" management tactic -- implement it. Supporting existing standarts -- look up interoperability -- benefits us all, reinventing the wheel without an unique vision besides ever increasing (projected) profit margins, wouldn't even benefit the company in the long term.

If you truly want to disrupt, disrupt by first (legally) taking the advantage of using someone else's already developed foundations to do so, the rest is attitude and hard to immitate competitive advantages. Good brainstorming questions in Anil's post whatsoever.

Spam Comments Attack on TechCrunch Continuing

In a previous post I commented on O'Reilly.com's war on spam according to their statistics, and thought you might find the most recent TechCrunch blog spam stats they've recently provided, informative as well :

"On January 4 we reported that the Akismet filter had stopped a million spam comments from reaching TechCrunch. At that point we’d been using it for about nine months. The number of blocked spam comments is now two million, just ten weeks later. That works out to about 15,000 spam comments hitting TechCrunch every day. If we did not have Akismet, we couldn’t allow anonymous commenting here on TechCrunch. We used to go through all spam comments to pick out the occasional false positive and accept it. Now, there are just too many to go through. All comments marked by Akismet as spam get deleted almost immediately."

I turned blog comments off quite a while ago and to be honest, the best comments, recommendations and tips, as well as people I've met through this blog, I received over email and backlinks. Keep 'em coming! Moreover, it's not just the inability of service providers to keep up with the aggresive generation of splogs, but malicious parties are already exploiting some of the fancy features that make blogs so flexible when it comes to personalization and social networking. Next time Fortinet will come up with another advisory, this time discussing MySpace so consider it as a cyclical shift from one provider to another depending on the current defenses in place -- blackhat SEO.

Personal Data Security Breaches Spreadsheet

Some stats try to emphasize on the number of people affected while forgetting the key points I outlined in a previous post related to why we cannot measure the real cost of cybercrime, and yes, duplicates among the affected people in any of the statistics available. The number of people affected will continue to rise, but that's not important, what's important is to identify the weakest link in this process, and for the time being, you're a "data hostage" in order to enjoy your modern lifestyle -- ever asked yourself what's gonna happen with your digital data after you're gone?

Spreadsheet nerds, here's something worth taking the time to around with, most importantly this huge dataset debunks the common myth of hackers taking the credit for the majority of personal data security breaches, whereas as you can see in the figures, on the majority of occasions -- and it's an ongoing trend -- companies themselves should get into the spotlight :

"On average, in 2005 personal records were compromised at a rate of 5.2 million a month. On average, in 2005 personal records were compromised at a rate of 5.8 million a month. Assuming a similar rate of growth, by November or December this year we we should cross the 2.0 billion mark. This is a conservative estimate because many of the news stories we archived were conservative on their own estimates of how many records were lost in particular incidents, and because a small number of incidents are reported without details of how many personal records were compromised.

View figures and tables of this paper as a *.pdf. View pre-publication draft of paper as a *.pdf. View dataset of incidents as a *.xls. View University of Washington Press office news release on this research."

Graphic presenting the risk of identity theft in the U.S only, based on the severity of data breaches, courtesy of the Danny Dougherty.

Complexity and Threats Mind Mapping

The folks at Security-Database.com -- who by the way expressed their excitement over my blog -- just released an outstanding mind mapping graph on the most common firefox security extensions used for various purposes starting from information gathering, and going up to data tampering :

"FireCAT is based upon a paper we wrote some weeks before (Turning firefox to an ethical hacking platform) and downloaded more than 25 000 times. We also thank all folks that encouraged us and sent their suggestions and ideas to make this project a reality. This initial release is presented as a mindmap and we are open to all your suggestions to make it a really good framework for all the community of security auditors and ethical hackers. We will make a special page for this framework soon to let you monitor this activity."

Great idea, reminds of Ollie Whitehouse's excellent mind mapping of mobile device threats. The semantics of security when applied in a visualized manner have the potential to limit the "yet another malware variant in the wild" type of news articles, or hopefully help the mainstream media break out of the "echo chamber" and re-publishing myopia, thus covering the basics.

Anyway, which is the most useful tool you'll ever encounter? It's called experience. Which is the most important threat to keep an eye on? It's your inability of not knowing what's going on at a particular moment, lack of situational awareness.