InfoWorld: Hacking is a business -- and business is good

Price lists, Black Friday discounts, and hacking as a service are all part of the increasingly sophisticated underground economy of cyber crime

By Bill Snyder
Dec 3, 2015

Parents freaked out when hackers stole millions of records from VTech, a Hong Kong-based toy maker. Because the records included information on at least 200,000 children, those mothers and fathers were probably more worried about kidnappings and child pornography than financial mischief.

But hacks like the attack on VTech are almost never related to violent crimes -- they're about money. Though the hackers' haul didn't include credit card numbers, the data dump was likely a precursor to a serious financial hack enabled by the personal information stolen from VTech, says Amit Ashbel, a cyber security analyst at Checkmarx, an application security firm.

Hacking has become a sophisticated global business, with published price lists, New Year's sales, and an etiquette all its own. The more information a hacker can supply to a potential customer, the more it is worth.

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