Cybersecurity & Cybercrime
Here’s Why Cybersecurity Gets More Complex Due to a Unique Strategy by Hackers.
If an offer is ambiguous and too good to be true, we must be more cautious.
Imagine you lost your tech job due to the pandemic. Your loved company is closed, struggling with economic challenges. And your family needs support to survive. You created a gig on the freelance sites advertising your exciting security skills.
One day you get an offer from a client equating at least ten times of previous daily rate. They ask you to collect data using your ethical hacking tools.
In addition, they confirm that you can do the job from home in your pajamas. When you have such an offer with remarkable flexibility and good pay, what would you do? Some freelance security consultants might jump into the opportunity with no hesitation.
Due to the pandemic in various parts of the globe, small IT companies in niche markets had to close their operations. Thus, talented cybersecurity experts lost their jobs and started looking for opportunities as freelancers. Since these people are skilled and experienced, the option is to be their own boss. Besides, they have great technical skills to make sense of the virtual world.
Let me return to the scenario I introduced in the first paragraph. My aim is to give you an idea of how the situation might progress and manifest.
The boss approaches the expert online. She introduces her company in general terms but does not provide links to it. Her reason is they are a cybersecurity company and cannot give details to the public.
Then they give the prospective employee a hyperlink through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that the public cannot access but is convinced that they are a legitimate company.
The applicant has no idea about the location of the company. The boss prefers to communicate only through virtual chat. She will assign the job through a virtual portal.
But as a freelancer, the prospective employee hardly knows anything about the boss. Maybe they can chat with a chatbot or virtual assistant. However, the application would not know the employment location, company background, and other necessary info required in traditional workplaces.
The initial task was to prove to them the applicant could do the job, so they gave him a few resources to work on. The employer requires the applicant to create virtual machines and work through allocated ports. As it is cybersecurity, the applicant is not surprised to sign an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement).
This scenario may sound imaginary, but it is actually happening. Now, this practice has turned into a serious issue for society. It is based on the principle that if you can’t beat them, join them. What do I mean by that?
My point in this story is hackers focus on hiring talented cybersecurity experts, such as ethical hackers and cybersecurity consultants, on obtaining critical information about target organizations.
The goal is to hire experienced freelancers who can work remotely to support the goals of hacking groups. This situation was common on the dark side of the net for several years; however, it is now happening overtly on the white side as well.
A real-life example of this scenario was documented by the Gemini Advisory company recently. The report is accessible publicly at this link.
I enjoyed reading this well-articulated article titled Hacker Groups Tricked Security Pros into Working for Them: Be careful who you work for; your new job could be in cybercrime by Ronke Babajide. The article provides valuable advice to cybersecurity practitioners.
There might be several reasons for hackers to hire cybersecurity specialists. The possible use case for this type of role could be ransomware. As you might know, hackers earn substantial income from ransomware attacks. For example, as reported on the Statista website, there were 304 million ransomware attacks worldwide in 2020. It was 638 million in 2016.
Dealing with ransomware is a challenge for consumers. But they are also a challenge for large business companies and even government organizations. Security organizations such as the FBI and Europol recognize ransomware as a key threat, as mentioned in this report.
I introduced ransomware in this story and provided practical risk mitigation and incident handling guidelines in this article.
Another common reason for hackers to hire talented security workers could be to access money from online banking systems. A well-known access method is creating malicious code designed to steal money from banks. I shared one of the incidents from my experience related to a security breach for a bank in this article.
While cybersecurity is essential as a preventive measure, we must also focus on making our systems more resilient.
Many freelancers in this economic climate need to find well-paying jobs online. However, it is crucial that we check the sources of jobs with rigor.
If an offer is ambiguous and too good to be true, we need to be more cautious not to get involved in cybercrime. This situation is not only for cybersecurity freelancers but many other online technology positions too.
Thank you for reading my perspectives.
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