The Russian Cybercriminal Underground has been around since 2004. In the 11 years since its establishment, it has evolved from a shady, ramshackle bazaar to modern, sophisticated, professional online marketplace that is a crucial part of today’s Deep Web.
Here at Trend Micro our Forward-Looking Threat Research Team (FTR) has been researching the Deep Web and Cybercrime Underground Economies for years. In particular, we’ve been looking into the Russian Underground for years with our research papers “Russian Underground 101” (2012) and “Russian Underground Revisited.”
Today, as part of our Deep Web series and continuing our work in sharing the results of our ongoing, extensive research into Cybercrime Underground Economies we are releasing our latest research into the Russian Underground with our new research paper “Russian Underground 2.0.”
In this latest paper, our researchers highlight not only the current trends in the Russian Underground but how these trends relate historical developments and shown by our ongoing research.
Some key areas of focus for this paper include:
| - Professionalization and Professionalism: Goods and services are available and being built, bought and sold in ways more like legitimate software and online shopping providers than ramshackle underground businesses.
- Market Expansion: Like all good professional marketplaces, the Russian underground is expanding to support customers’ desires for new goods and services. The Russian Underground increasing has offerings to cater to customers’ increasing appetites for attacks targeting mobile devices and home routers. Attackers who find they need high quality language translation for spearphishing and spam or native language speakers for false phone verification can increasingly find these services for sale.
- Political Activism and Activity: Russian Cybercriminals have heeded Vladimir Putin’s call to support Russia during recent current events, most notably the ongoing situation in Ukraine. In our paper our researchers outline how member of the Russian Underground act as an online militia supporting Russia and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
- Falling Prices: Thanks to our investment of years of research into the Russian Underground, we are able to document another way that the Russian Underground mirrors professional retailers is in falling prices. As technology improves, market forces bring prices for goods and services down over time.
- Bulletproof Hosting Services: Following up on our recent paper explaining what bulletproof hosting services are and how they operate, this paper goes into more specific detail on bulletproof hosting services in the Russian Underground.
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This is just some of the information in this paper. To learn more details, please be sure to see our full paper here.
Be sure to see our comprehensive Deep Web and Cybercrime Underground Economy Series papers online at: http://ift.tt/1Sc48KT
Please add your thoughts in the comments below or follow me on Twitter; @ChristopherBudd.
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