Are underground cloud services a thing Well, they are quite real, and criminals are taking advantage of their presence to accelerate attacks and give compromised businesses no room to react.
This information comes from Trend Micro’s new report on cybersecurity. The firm found terabytes of internal business data and logins for companies like PayPal, Amazon, and Google, being sold on the dark web.
The logins are sold using access to the cloud logs where they are stored. From these findings, Trend Micro believes that hits on monetized accounts will be effective now. The time from the compromise of an account to when it gets hit takes days or hours instead of weeks now.
Advantages on both sides
Businesses love the scalability and speed of cloud services, but they are not the only ones. Criminals are taking to cloud services like ducks to water. More power and bandwidth make their operations more effective.
All they need to do is buy the logs of cloud-based stolen data and use the data to start secondary infections, often opting to use ransomware.
The report says that the new trend may just be the popular thing in the hacker culture. It could create a new kind of cybercriminals who are experts in data mining and using machine learning to enhance their operations.
AI-powered crime?
With cloud services, criminals can create algorithms that leverage AI and machine learnings to enhance their ability to compromise a device and get into a system. All of this will make the pre-processing and extraction of information more accessible.
The maximization of potential is almost as unlimited for criminals as for the businesses they intend to attack.
At the moment, Trend Micro is convinced that the criminals will focus on standardizing their pricing models and services.
Tip: Cybercrime becomes more sophisticated: ‘we can’t continue like this.’
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