Coffins in the Mail Are a Trick of the Cybercrime Trade

There's never been a better time to get involved in cybercrime.

That's the tongue-in-cheek assessment of Uri Rivner, RSA's head of new technologies for identity protection and verification, who gave a presentation at the RSA security conference in London on Wednesday.

But there is truth in his quip -- the poor economy is driving people to find other work and it has become much easier for cybercriminals to recruit people, known as "mules," to carry out crucial duties for scams.

Seduced by promises of extremely high weekly pay while working only a few hours, people agree to do tasks such as reship goods or allow their bank accounts to receive funds for transfers elsewhere.

The problem is, the goods are stolen, and their addresses are being used as drops, allowing the cybercriminals the luxury of not receiving the stolen goods directly that have been bought with stolen credit card data. Mules are also duped into allowing money to be transferred into their own bank accounts and then ordered to transfer the money elsewhere, a type of money laundering.

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Experts See Forecast Worsen for Cybercrime

Law enforcement agencies can count a few recent victories against cybercriminals, but agents say the battle against them isn't getting any easier.

Highly organized cybercriminals are using increasingly sophisticated tools and methods that make them hard to trace, said Keith Mularski, supervisory special agent with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Division.

"They have evolved over the years," Mularkski said. "It really is organized crime."

Mularski, who spoke at the RSA conference in London on Wednesday, has had great success in infiltrating organized cybercrime rings. He successfully infiltrated a ring known as DarkMarket, an online forum where criminals bought and sold personal data, such as credit card numbers. DarkMarket was shut down about a year ago and 59 people were arrested, with the help of authorities in the U.K., Germany, Turkey and other countries.

While the DarkMarket bust was a big win, there are still such forums operating today and they're hard to infiltrate. New members must be vetted for reliability and to ensure they're not agents like Mularski.

The malicious software programs used to collect the data have become insidiously complicated and hard to detect. Financial organizations now are in a "raging battle" against "high-grade" weaponry, said Uri Rivner, RSA's head of new technologies for identity protection and verification, who gave a presentation earlier in the day at RSA.

Those programs go by names such as Sinowal -- also known as Mebroot and Torpig -- which is a nasty rootkit that burrows in a computer's master boot record below the OS. It may not even be removed by reinstalling the operating system. It can steal data and even modify the HTML of Web pages requested by a user.
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