When Malware Becomes a Service, Anyone Can Be a Hacker

This growing trend among attackers is also creating new challenges for security firms. Many companies admit that it has now become more complex to catch the bad guys and take actions against them.

On Christmas Eve 2014, lots of people across the globe switched on their Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles, only to find that they could not connect to the Internet. Microsoft and Sony had been attacked. A hacker group named Lizard Squad boldly took responsibility for the breach. Worse, there was nothing extraordinary about this outage. Both the gaming giants have had such experiences in the past. But what was remarkable about this debacle was that Lizard Squad was offering its hacking service - in this case, a DDoS attack - commercially to anyone interested.

It wasn't the most popular trend then, but hacking groups had previously offered such services commercially. Still, until that point, this marketplace largely existed only on the Dark Web, a group of websites - many of which are illegal - that cannot be accessed easily by using popular Web browsers such as Google Chrome. Lizard Squad was, wittingly or not, about to change things.

"For quite a while, online criminals have been moving to service models," says Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure. "We've seen it with DDoS attacks as a service, banking trojans as a service, and ransom trojans as a service among others."

What was once being operated behind the curtains - on Dark Web - is now being publicly marketed on popular platforms such Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. One of the most popular available attacks is DDoS, in which a huge amount of 'fake' traffic is sent to a server, ultimately causing it to crash. A service, whose name has been withheld in the public interest, sells users toolkits that offer 125Gbps network capacity with 300 seconds boot time for as low as EUR 5 (roughly Rs. 380).

Earlier this month, an infamous spyware program called AlienSpy was found being openly sold to people as a malware-as-a-service platform. The malware in question, which affects Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android platforms, was first found in 2013, and has affected nearly 443,000 individuals and organisations around the world, a representative of security research firm Kaspersky told Gadgets 360 in an emailed response. Around 2,000 attackers are estimated to be using the tool. The people behind the program are making around $200,000 (approximately Rs. 1.3 crore) per year.

AlienSpy isn't the only malware that you can purchase and cause destruction with. A company called ReFud, for instance, offers malware attackers the ability to mutate their existing malware, so that anti-virus programs won't recognise - or detect - it. And these are broad examples, things that you might not have heard of.

Ransomware, a security attack in which a malicious program locks all your files, operates largely under the malware-as-a-service umbrella. For instance, a popular toolkit is cryptolocker/ cryptowall, and it is making victims cough up around $3,000 (approximately Rs. 2 lakh) to unlock their files.

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