The cybercriminal market has evolved in the past year due to the pandemic. Atlas VPN analyzed the Criminal Market for Initial Access study released by Positive Technologies. The report includes details on how the criminal market has evolved throughout 2020 and early 2021.
The most popular services industry
According to Atlas VPN’s findings, 45% of corporate network access costs less than $1K on the dark web. Businesses in the services and manufacturing industries are the main options for hackers when planning an attack.
Hackers put up 45% of offers for access to corporate networks for less than $1,000 on the dark web. While this percentage in 2017 was only 15%, the rate has risen between Q2 2020 and Q1 2021 to what it is now.
Access to corporate networks that cost between $1,000 and $2,499 made up 22% of the dark web market. However, the corporate network accesses priced between $2,500 and $4,999 accounted for 17% of the underground forum market.
Hackers evaluate the number of computers to be exposed, account privileges, businesses size, revenue, and other financial indicators. In addition to this factor, the industry in which the company is operating impacts access price.
Some industries are more vulnerable than others. The services industry is the most popular among cybercriminals, as 17% chose to target this sector. As the services industry has a lot of sensitive data about their customers, businesses become lucrative targets for hackers.
Secondly, the manufacturing sector increased by 14% of hackers. By gaining access to a manufacturing business, cybercriminals could steal personal information and severely disrupt normal operations.
Moreover, 12% of cybercriminals on the dark web selected the research and education industry to attack. As smaller schools usually do not have the best system security, low-skilled threat actors find them easier victims.
Additionally, the IT industry became a target for 7% of threat actors which purchased corporate network accesses. Finally, all other industries accumulated 26% of accesses sold on the dark web forums.