A new report from security specialist Imperva warns that hackers have become industrialised and represent an exponentially increased threat to individuals, organisations and Government.

“The emerging industrialisation of hacking parallels the way in which the 19th century revolution advanced methods and accelerated assembly from single to mass production. The result is that today’s cybercrime industry has transformed and automated itself to improve efficiency, scalability and profitability,” explained Imperva CTO Amichai Shulman.

Over the years, a clear definition of roles and responsibilities within the hacking community has developed to form a supply chain that resembles a drug cartel.

The division of labour in today’s industrialised hacking industry includes:
· Researchers: A researcher’s sole responsibility is to hunt for vulnerabilities in applications, frameworks, and products and feed their knowledge to malicious organisations for the sake of profit;
· Farmers: who maintain and increase the presence of botnets in cyberspace through mass infection; and
· Dealers: tasked with the distribution of malicious payloads.

Hacking techniques once considered cutting-edge and executed only by savvy experts are now bundled into software tools available for download.

Today, the hacking community typically deploys a two-stage process designed to proliferate botnets and perform mass attacks:
· Search engine manipulation. This technique is the most prevalent method used to spread bots, yet remains virtually unknown to the general public. Essentially, attackers promote Web-link references to infected pages by leaving comment spam in online forums and by infecting legitimate sites with hidden references to infected pages. For example, a hacker may infect unsuspecting Web pages with invisible references to popular search terms, such as ‘Britney Spears’ or ‘Tiger Woods’. Search engines then scour the websites reading the invisible references. As a result, these malicious websites now top search engine results. In turn, consumers unknowingly visit these sites and consequently infected their computers with the botnet software.
· Executing mass attacks through automated software—To gain unauthorised access into applications, dealers input email addresses and user names as well as upload lists of anonymous proxy addresses into specialised software, the same way consumers upload addresses to distribute holiday cards. Automated attack software then performs a password attack by entering commonly used passwords. In addition, today’s industrialised hackers can also input a range of URLs and obtain inadequately protected sensitive data.

The report, The Industrialisation of Hacking, can be downloaded at http://www.imperva.com/ld/industrialization.asp