Psst - wanna buy a pirate MPack toolkit?
Dirty deeds done dirt cheap
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
The adage about no honour among thieves also applies to hackers, it would seem. Pirates are flogging knocked-off copies of the MPack hacker toolkit at a discount of up to 85 per cent, according to anti-virus experts at net security firm Symantec.
MPack is a web browser exploit toolkit, sold online by its original authors to hackers at prices ranging from $500 to $1,000. The application is offered with modular extras, maintenance updates and what amounts to support contracts that in many ways rival or surpass those offered by legitimate software suppliers.
Thousands of websites (mainly in Italy) were recently compromised using the MPack malware kit in order to add iframe tags that pointed surfers towards hacker-controlled websites.
The toolkit is written in a script language, sand considering a lucrative business model has evolved around the package it comes as no great surprise that it has become the target of piracy. The package is "easy to redistribute and modify," notes Symantec anti-virus researcher Eric Chien.
Ripped off copies of the toolkit are being sold online for as low as $150, an 85 per cent discount. It's likely that hackers didn't even need to buy the package in order to start-up their illicit business, according to Chien, who reckons its more likely they downloaded the whole kit for free from one of several websites hosting the malware kit.
"With the toolkit available to almost anyone for a mere $150, its usage is likely to grow. In addition, without a single author controlling the distribution of the toolkit, we also expect to see forks of the source code with additional exploits, bug fixes, and other feature enhancements," he writes. ®
COMMENTS
amanfrommars attacks
he sounds a lot like that guy from pratchett. eg Reflected Sounds of Under Ground Spirits = Echo Gnome ics = economics
Contains filth tunnel insects = in sewer ants = insurance.
I may be completely off of course...anyhew
If the source is completely available then surely defenses can be setup to defeat the rootkit as we will know how exactly the exploits are....well...exploited?
I'm just waiting
for the first lawsuit. Surely these hackers are going to want to protect their valuable IP, right ?
Right.
Oh, and concerning the above subject, I stop reading a post any time I encounter a sentence that has almost as many capital letters as words. I also stop reading anything that gives me a headache. AMFM manages to do both in just two sentences. I wish I had that spidey-sense !
Not Legit?
"[L]egitimate software suppliers"? Do you mean that as a software supplier they're not legitimate, or that they don't supply legitimate software? Either way, what is your def. of legit? If they're doing a better job at support than "other" soft suppliers, then whose the blacksheep struggling to come in from behind the cold eight-ball?
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
