IoT security: Storm brewing on the digital underground, as criminals flock to forums

A study of the digital underground by Trend Micro has revealed that the IoT attacks and services market is rapidly growing and diversifying Cybercriminals around the world are actively discussing how to compromise connected devices, and how to abuse these devices to further their moneymaking scams Researchers from Trend Micro analyzed forums in the Russian, Portuguese, English, Arabic, and Spanish language-based underground markets in order to get the low-down on how cybercriminals are abusing and monetizing connected devices Russian and Portuguese-speaking forums, in which financially-driven attacks are most prominent, turned out to be the most advanced criminal markets in the sample set. In these forums, cybercriminal activity is focused on selling access to compromised devices – mainly routers, webcams, and printers – to earn a dishonest income from black hat hacking exploits.