Town halls, media, companies, and even hospitals: no one is safe from cyberpirates, on the lookout for the slightest computer flaw to hold their prey to ransom. And the attacks are intensifying: 500,000 new viruses are detected every day. Who are these hackers? What are their modus operandi?
“Complementary investigation has managed to approach a master in infiltration in a lawless zone, where contacts are made between pirates: the darknet, the hidden part of the internet where cybercriminals gravitate anonymously.
What do we find on these “rather dark marketplaces“? With “Xylitol”, as our contact is called, guided tour on very private forums. This one is paid for or accessible by referral. Difficult for a layman to access it… Not for Xylitol, is content with “hack other hackers” and of “steal their accounts“.
“For sale: access to the Connecticut government site, $8,000”
Here, everything is bought, everything is sold: services, data, access. This is where hackers monetize, more or less depending on the value of the data, what they have managed to hack. For sale that day, access to the sites of a “French box (hospital or clinic, we don’t really know)“, Italian municipalities or even the “Government of Connecticut” ($8,000).
Tracking down cybercriminals is this shadow vigilante’s hobby. At home, he has all the necessary gear and has the same skills as those he hunts on a daily basis. In its servers, it stores the hundreds of thousands of computer viruses that it has already listed. A veritable bank of viruses, each of which contains the hackers’ DNA, their signature. Enough to bring down more than one.
A virus bank and a hunting board that interest the FBI
The “Xylitol” hunting list is impressive: he has identified and located several thousand pirates, all over the planet. And in this very closed environment, he did not only make friends. He has received threats several times, such as “We will send you crack and we will call the police”.
If the pirates threaten him, the secret services of several foreign countries court him. The FBI would have exchanged with him by e-mail to ask for his help on certain malware and would have even tried to recruit him (“Xylitol” says he did not have “never followed up“).
Excerpt from “Hackers: the new robbers”, a document to be reviewed in “Complementary investigation” on November 10, 2022.
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