The Business of Hackers-for-Hire Threat Actors

Today’s web has made hackers’ tasks remarkably easy. For the
most part, hackers don’t even have to hide in the dark recesses of
the web to take advantage of people any longer; they can be found
right in plain sight on social media sites or forums,
professionally advertised with their websites, and may even
approach you anonymously through such channels as Twitter.

Cybercrime has entered a new era where people don’t steal just
for the thrill of doing it anymore. They make it their business to
carry out illegal cyber activities in small groups or individually
to earn business from online criminals, selling offensive services
like spyware as a service or commercial cybersecurity.

For instance, a series of new DDoS for Hire are commoditizing
the art of hacking and reducing the barrier to launching DDoS attacks^[1].

Who are Hackers-for-Hire?

Hackers-for-hire are secret cyber experts or groups who
specialize in infiltrating organizations to acquire intelligence in
one way or another. They offer their services to people who
encounter problems when trying to break into an organization for
various reasons, for example, lack of skills necessary for the
operation or simply because they cannot do it by themselves.

• A hacker would like to steal the private email of a person
  going through a divorce, separation, or child custody case. Why?
  Because hackers don’t mind breaking the law and getting involved in
  financial and legal disputes as long as they can benefit
  financially.
• False information and malicious actions on social media can
  cause social confusion (not just political).
• A hackers-for-hire group would attempt to access bank accounts
  to execute data breaches^[2], which
  they could sell on the black market at a percentage of the
  account’s current cash balance.

Hackers-for-Hire Emerge as A Threat

Since 2020, Hackers-for-hire has had unprecedented access to
computer networks and have posed as hackers and users contracted to
perform different kinds of work for them. For example, COVID-19 was
seen as a big threat because it gave hackers something that we
might see in the future more often– the ability to use computers
via clever public communications channels like Twitter and
email.

If any of your assets are valuable, and if others have a vested
interest in taking these assets away from you, you should expect to
be the target of an attack.

How Hack-For-Hire Operations Work

To get a general overview of the whole process, we can break
everything down into three phases that make up a surveillance
chain. The first phase involves reconnaissance, where hackers will
gather as much information about their target’s company or business
as they can by using various tools and techniques. This informative
phase will then inform phase 2, where hackers will carry out
attacks to damage their target.

Let’s try to understand the working as follows:

1 — Reconnaissance

In the reconnaissance stage, cyber hackers start as information
gatherers and data miners when they start to profile their targets
silently. A few examples of how they do this is by gathering
information about them from publicly available sources such as
blogs, social media, knowledge management platforms like Wikipedia
and Wikidata, news media, forums, etc. (this can involve scraping
dark websites too).

2 — Engagement

During the Engagement phase, an attacker, using the power of
social engineering, tries to build trust with you and uses that as
a way to gain your confidence and trick you into sharing
confidential information. The attacker’s objective is to get you
excited about clicking on what they might refer to as a “special
link” or downloading a file that they say will give you more
details. Social engineering is a form of manipulation that might be
directed through tricking, deceiving, or even blackmailing an
individual. By talking to the people, you are after information,
you can eventually gain access or manipulate them into answering
your questions.

3 — Exploitation

A hacker’s primary objective during the exploitation stage is to
gain access to surveillance for mobile phones or computers.

A hacker can access personal data on a victim’s phone or
computer by taking advantage of keyloggers and phishing websites.
These elements allow them to steal sensitive information like
passwords, cookies, access tokens, photos, videos, messages, and
more. They may be able to hack into the microphone on your cell
phone or the camera on your computer to activate them even without
your knowledge.

Who are Hackers-for-Hire Targets?

Cybercriminals have a soft spot for targeting companies that
would have access to sensitive information like social security
numbers, credit card details, etc. They target every kind of
organization, including financial, Hospitals, cellular equipment
vendors, and radio and satellite communication companies in the
hope of exposing sensitive details. Sometimes they focus on
individuals like CIOs, Human rights activists, workers like
journalists, politicians, telecommunications engineers, and medical
doctors, etc.

How to Protect Businesses from
Hackers-for-Hire?

By far, the most common attack when it comes to hacking is
phishing. Many cybercriminals will use this method as a starting
point and generally do not go further than the compromise of email
accounts and data exfiltration. This means that threat actors don’t
necessarily need any malware because basic social engineering
tricks can be enough.

But what can we do at our end to safeguard our critical assets
from prying eyes? Let’s discuss the top four ways.

— Scan your Assets

With a vulnerability assessment service, you’ll be able to
identify common security vulnerabilities in your websites and
applications and related libraries that are likely a result of weak
coding. It can then be passed onto an application developer so they
know what holes in the code they might need to patch up.

— Pen Testing

Penetration testing is detecting and analyzing potential
security vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit.
Penetration testing, also known as ethical hacking, white hat
hacking, or security testing, is a type of validation testing used
to attack a computer system to find vulnerabilities within the
target application, network, or device.

— Keep Apps Up-To-Date

If you’re seeking to beef up your application’s
security, an important aspect is constant sync testing and patching
of web applications, which need to be protected. An organization
needs to be able to stay on top of new threats and vulnerability
patches as soon as possible, so it’s necessary to update your
security suite regularly.

— Prepare to Block Attacks

No matter how well you ensure your network is guarded against
hackers, there will always be cyber-criminals just waiting for the
right opportunity to wreak havoc with attacks like DDoS.

A way to thwart the biggest and most powerful cyber-attack is to
ensure that you have an anti-DDoS cyber shield in place. AppTrana WAF^[3], from the Indusface,
stops malicious traffic to keep hackers away from the site.

Conclusion

Information security researchers believe that to effectively
detect and repair web application security vulnerabilities,
individuals/groups should adopt a combination of static and dynamic
web application testing methods backed by a web application
firewall for instant virtual patching for the detectable defects
within your system.

Trusted security partners are like skilled bodyguards. They stay
on top of the latest methods to access confidential information and
carry out regular monitoring rounds to keep your data safe from any
security breaches.