Technology Forum

Move over Tony Soprano, cybercriminals are now as organised as the Mafia.That's according to research from Finjan which found that the chain of command of a cybercrime gang is very similar to Mafia hierarchies. The report outlines a pyramid of hackers, data sellers, managers and malicious programmers, all working in a fluid management structure in order to profit from cybercrime.Finjan researchers joined forums where credit card details and other data is sold, knowns as "carding sites." They impersonated interested data buyers while collecting intelligence on the operations' management hierarchy, said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan's CTO."We kind of had a feeling that something had changed there," Ben-Itzhak said. "There is something even more organised there."When a person's credit card details are stolen, the details are sold on the carding websites, where salespeople offer a menu of available information. Those salespeople don't exploit the data they possess but rather seek to sell it to someone who does. Those salespeople also aren't responsible for the hacking. http://www.techworld.com/security/ne...&NewsID=102157