EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Last year, well-known security blogger Brian Krebs reported on a story that involved two cyber “guns for hire” who were running vDOS, a service to take out websites with denial of service attacks on behalf of paying clients.
Following that story, two significant things happened:
- The two men were arrested; and
- Krebs’ site was attacked, leading to a three-day outage.
Through careful tracking by researchers, vDOS went from a very profitable business earning about $42,000 a month for its proprietors to being shut down.
When following the money, it becomes clear that there is no doubt that cybercrime is organized crime. And, effectively, an economy unto itself.
