Mercenary Cyber Spies For Hire
It was once the case that only governments had the technical ability to penetrate secure data, telecoms networks and the devices connected to them. Today, the threat posed by private firms with cyber capabilities that rival the world’s most skilled spy agencies, is not widely known.
The spy-for-hire industry targets people and organisations and aims to collect their intelligence information and monitor them to infiltrate their technology devices. These operations silently get their victims to unwittingly reveal information and often compromise their devices and accounts.
One such as these is an emerging cyber crime organisation called the Atlantis Cyber-Army or the Atlas Intelligence Group (AIG), which is offering a range of services, including exclusive data leaks, DDoS attacks, and Remote Desktop Protoctol (RDP) exploits.
This criminal group operates on a for-hire basis and seeks to recruit cyber mercenaries that conduct specific illicit activities that are pieces of larger cyber campaigns.
Organised threat groups tend to follow a similar path in which they recruit individuals with certain desirable capabilities that can benefit the group’s agenda. AIG strays from this model by outsourcing specific aspects of an attack to mercenaries, who are not responsible or involved in the rest of the attack. Each actor focuses on a specific piece of the attack and multiple different individuals may be involved. Their activities include Ransomware-as-a-Service exploits which can involve multiple threat actors, each being paid a percentage of any extorted funds or digital assets stolen.
What makes AIG different is it outsources specific aspects of an attack to mercenaries who have no further involvement in an attack.
The group is understood to have targeted various sectors, including education, finance, government entities, manufacturing and technology, and published leaked databases for sale on the Dark Web, with a starting price from little as 15 Euros.
AIG offers premium services that demand more skill and demonstrate the group’s sophistication, researchers said. One of these products is hacked panels and initial access to organisations, with prices for these services starting from about $1,000. The group also offers “VIP services” that claim ties to people in law-enforcement positions across Europe that can give customers access to sensitive information about specific individuals.
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