A Ferrari has been offered to the hacker who can come up with the best scam.
According to the Times of India, the gift is part of a bizarre “employee of the month” competition from the leader of a global cyber crime syndicate who offers the luxury car as a prize.
Speaking to the Independent on Sunday, Troels Oerting, the head of the European Cybercrime Centre, said that a video was posted on the so-called dark net, an encrypted network that ensures users’ anonymity, offering lavish rewards for young technological talent.
“A kingpin will offer a Porsche or a Ferrari to sub-groups who earn the most money,” said Oerting, who added that the video was shot from a “car showroom, with a couple of blondes and a guy saying: those who make most money can get this car”.
Commenting, TK Keanini, CTO at Lancope, said: “I’m not at all surprised here, but I think they may be limiting their audience with this offer. On average, a Ferrari costs $200,000; but there are people on the dark markets paying well into $250,000 for zero day exploits on specific platforms. When you consider how much money they can make monetizing this type of capability, it is cheap! When I say limiting their audience, some of the people innovating in this area may not be of the driving age.
As dark markets like Silk Road 2.0 grow, these markets thrive and organised criminals no longer have to employ their own expertise for cyber crime, they can just buy it the old fashioned way.”
Former L0pht member Dildog, Veracode co-founder and chief scientist Christien Rioux told IT Security Guru that a “weaponised exploit” which is perfect and executes can take 6-9 months to develop, and that is a long time for a developer. “So they have to find a way to monetise that, and it requires hundreds of people buying it for a few hundred dollars a time,” he said. “That’s where the economy makes it explode a little bit.”
Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva, said he found it odd that criminal organisations resort to “advertising” an “employee of the month” program, and speculated that this was a hoax. “I don’t think that we’ve seen this with recruiting skilled chemists for drug making and drug design or astute economists for money laundering schemes.”
