Is Russia Really the Cybercrime Capital?

[Audrey McNeil <audrey () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/08/06/billion_password_hack_russian_hackers_aren_t_prolific_they_re_just_really.html

The New York Times reported yesterday that a Russian crime ring had
assembled a collection of more than a billion Internet passwords. While
some are casting doubt on claims that this is the “biggest hack ever,” it
does appear to be a significant milestone in the history of cybercrime as
well as the latest in a string of high-profile cases involving Russian
hackers.

Earlier this month, alleged hacker Roman Selezev, known online by the alias
Track2, was arrested in Guam on suspicion of stealing data from hundreds of
thousands of credit cards. He’s currently the subject of a diplomatic
scuffle between Washington and Moscow. And in June, the U.S.unveiled
charges against Evgeniy Bogacgev, who is accused of installing malware on
computers around the world to access banking data, leading to more than
$100 million in thefts. Does this all mean that Russia is the world capital
of hacking?

In volume terms, it’s not at all. In a report last year, cloud services
provider Akamai reported that Indonesia had overtaken China as the leading
source of cyberattacks, accounting for 38 percent of the worldwide total.
Russian hackers accounted for a measly 1.7 percent of attacks, putting them
behind their counterparts in the United States, Taiwan, Turkey, and India.

What Russia does have is a fairly robust underground cybercrime market,
reportedly valued at around $2 billion per year. Russian hackers are also
blamed for about a third of all new viruses. The first widely reported bank
hacking case—the transfer of $10 million from a Citibank account in
1994—involved a hacker in St. Petersburg. Services from password theft to
spamming to denial of service attacks are relatively easy to acquire from
Russian hackers.

And while the evidence here is more anecdotal, Russian hackers do seem to
be behind plenty of particularly audacious hacks, such as, allegedly, the
malware that captured data from 70 million Target customers.

Why would Russia have such a highly developed black market for hackers? It
may be that enforcement is lax, although Russia has launched periodic
crackdowns on cybercrime. Some have also suggested that the sluggish
Russian economy has failed to provide employment for graduates of the
country’s very strong technical universities.

Whatever the reason, it’s likely that ongoing geopolitical tensions will
make it less likely that the U.S. and Russia will cooperate on getting to
source of the problem, and that cybercrime will continue to be a source of
diplomatic friction in the years to come.

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