Billion-dollar hackers: meet the gangs treating cybercrime like the Fortune 500
Data breaches seem to dominate the news these days but in the mind of to Joe Public, hacking is still the sole domain of antisocial nerds and computer geeks. A stereotype persists to this day that most (if not all) hackers are spotty, teenage basement-dwellers, crashing websites for giggles rather than multi-million-dollar paydays.
That might have been true in the early years of the internet, says Andy Patel, F-Secure security expert and resident 'Cyber Gandalf' (no, really). “In the days when you had the things that infected your Outlook and sent stuff to your contacts,” he tells IT Pro, “it was just about spreading stuff, it wasn't so much about monetising.”
That is no longer the case, however. Hacking is now big business, and cyber crime gangs are using techniques like ransomware, data theft and digital extortion to generate six-figure incomes. In fact, the FBI has calculated that ransomware alone will net cyber criminals a total of $1 billion in 2016.
