A band of hackers who were recently discovered hoarding a trove of account logons pilfered from thousands of companies worldwide are garden-variety cyberthieves, security experts say.
The gang most likely began by hiring spam specialists to send out e- mail and social- networking posts to lure recipients into clicking on a tainted Web link, says Don Jackson, senior researcher at SecureWorks.
They then used a dated free version of a hacking tool called ZeuS and did nothing to hide their tracks, indicating that “they’re probably amateurs,” Jackson says. That disclosure underscores how deeply cybercriminals — from novices to elite gangs — have now saturated the Internet with infections that allow them to take full control of Windows PCs. Cybergangs slot newly infected PCs, called bots, into networks called botnets. On any given day, 12% to 15% of the 1.6 billion computers connected to the Internet are bots, according to security firm Damballa.