'Hackers for Hire'- Major Police Effort To Fight Criminal Gangs.
A “small number” of hackers offer "cybercrime as a service” creating a market a for criminal gangs to bid for targets to be attacked.
A major international effort is needed to defeat cybercrime and disrupt the criminal gangs who are using “hackers for hire” to hit sensitive financial and government targets, the UK’s anti-cybercrime boss has warned.
Andy Archibald, the head of the UK’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU), said that a “small number” of hackers were offering “cybercrime as a service”, and had created a marketplace where gangs could bid for targets to be attacked.
His warning comes after it emerged that Chinese hackers are suspected of carrying out a “massive breach” on the 5th June of the personal data of nearly 4 million US government workers. This is amid suggestions it was one of the largest known thefts of US government records.
Mr Archibald called for the NCCU to work with more international police forces and the private sector to prevent cybercrime and to track down those responsible, adding it was impossible to “arrest your way out of cybercrime”.
Mr Archibald said that the majority of sophisticated cyber attacks were financially motivated and “principally against” the financial services sector. Last night security experts speculated that the US records had been targeted to allow suspected Chinese hackers to build a vast database of federal employees in what could be preparation for future attacks against the US. China has called the allegations “counter-productive” and irresponsible.
Speaking recently alongside Mr Archibald, the information security expert Professor Alan Woodward suggested as few as 100 or 200 cyber criminals might be responsible for the majority of advanced cybercrime.
Mr Archibald said he could “not put a number on the size of the threat”, but agreed that a small number of hackers were writing damaging software for sale to gangs of criminals and said there was a “viable route” to “take them out”.
He said: “The point I’d make is that the approach for dealing with cybercrime has to be quite sophisticated. Traditional crime happens inside your state’s jurisdiction. That’s no longer the case, and we need to work collectively to meet this new threat, and that includes working closely with the private sector. We need an international response.”
The NCCU already has strong links with the FBI and Europol, and Mr Archibald is quick to point to the success of a co-ordinated day of action in March against cyber criminals, aided by forensic information provided by the FBI. On the day, 56 suspects UK-wide were arrested on suspicion of offences ranging from network intrusion and data theft to cyber-enabled fraud and denial of service attacks on multinational companies and government agency websites.
Elsewhere, though, the NCCU faced criticism for quietly forging relationships with its counterparts in China, despite private firms reporting high levels of state-sponsored cyber espionage originating from the country.
