The Chinese Underground In 2013
The Chinese underground has continued to grow since we last looked at it. It is still highly profitable, the cost of connectivity and hardware continues to fall, and there are more and more users with poor security precautions in place.
In short, it is a good time to be a cybercriminal in China. So long as there is money to be made, more people may be tempted to become online crooks themselves.
How can we measure the growth of the Chinese underground economy? We can look at the volume of their communications traffic. Many Chinese cybercriminals talk via groups on the popular Chinese instant messaging application QQ.
We have been keeping an eye on these groups since March 2012. By the end of 2013, we had obtained 1.4 million publicly available messages from these groups. The data we gathered helped us determine certain characteristics and developing trends in the Chinese underground economy.
First, the number of messages showed that the amount of underground activity in China doubled in the last 10 months of 2013 compared with the same period in 2012. Based on the ID of the senders, we also believe that the number of participants has also doubled in the same period.
Figure 1. Number of underground-related messages identified on QQ per month
Cybercriminals are also going where the users are. Many of the malicious goods being sold in the underground economy are targeted at mobile users, as opposed to PC users. A mobile underground economy is emerging in China (something we noted earlier this year), and this part of the underground economy appears to be more attractive and lucrative than other portions.
Our latest paper in the Cybercrime Underground Economy Series titled The Chinese Underground In 2013 contains the details of these findings related to QQ, as well as other updates dealing with the Chinese underground.
Post from: Trendlabs Security Intelligence Blog – by Trend Micro
The Chinese Underground In 2013
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