Читать книгу Security Engineering - Ross Anderson - Страница 44

Since about 2005, the emergence of underground markets has led to people specialising as providers of criminal infrastructure, most notably botnet herders, malware writers, spam senders and cashout operators. I will discuss the technology in much greater detail in section 21.3; in this section my focus is on the actors and the ecosystem in which they operate. Although this ecosystem consists of perhaps a few thousand people with revenues in the tens to low hundreds of millions, they impose costs of many billions on the industry and on society. Now that cybercrime has been industrialised, the majority of ‘jobs’ are now in boring roles such as customer support and system administration, including all the tedious setup work involved in evading law enforcement takedowns [456]. The ‘firms’ they work for specialise; the entrepreneurs and technical specialists can make real money. (What's more, the cybercrime industry has been booming during the coronavirus pandemic.)