Internet Black Markets - Part THREE

Wed Sep 23 00:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

In business terms, most of the humans can be categorized into two sub species. One makes his money work for him and others work for the money. But there is a dangerous third mutated species; these species earn money by scavenging on success of others, or on theirs habits.

This blog is third in the series of "Internet Black Markets". Part 1 explored domain hoarding; counterfeit products, antisocial networking and propaganda marketplaces, and Part 2 detailed fake traffic generators, click frauds, SEO and plagiarism. Part 3, is about money scavengers who have no success of their own but they hold on to the body of Internet like a tick on the beast.

Spamming

Half of the emails I receive are spams; older the email address higher is the percentage of spams. Spamming is  restricted not only to the emails but has also won over mobile phones, websites, discussion forums, SMS and Bluetooth. There are rules and regulations governing the spams but had they been successful, I would not have been writing about it now.

Spammers promote products, frauds, agenda and propaganda with very cheap mode of advertisement. Net cost of hiring a spam agency in India, can get you rate of 400 spam emails per dollar. But the cost vary based on what is the product you are selling, what is your target audience and what geographic location you are targeting. Spamming agencies also work on share per sale basis with a minimum base fee.

Spam reduces the productivity of individuals and corporations. This effect is bearable in terms of bandwidth usage, stress, or online fraud but the time wasted in separating and then deleting the spam runs into billions of dollars worldwide. One can delete the spam or block it, but it is easier said then done. Success of spam is caused by unaware netizens who have entertained such advertising emails at some time or another. You stop reading them they will stop sending spams.

P2P/Piracy

Peer-to-Peer networking commonly known as file sharing networks is biggest success after the online emailing. It is a hot potato, more you oppose - bigger success it becomes. From Napster to iMesh to torrents of today there is no stopping it. Like a coin P2P also has two sides, does not matter which one is yours, one cannot deny the push it gives to the Piracy.

Harry potter books are available to read before they are even printed, latest movie will appear just after the opening show: music, pornography, software, games, published media anything which can be digitized is available on p2p networks. P2P does not only harm the company with copyrights but they also put the users at risk who download the media from unsolicited sources, putting their own computers at risk.

Other risk of P2P is bandwidth clogging. Those who use to share mp3 files few years back are now sharing gigabytes of videos. Lets take ideal scenario: Downloading one gigabyte of file on 1mbps line will take around 3 hours of time keeping network latency in mind. Considering million of users on the web doing the same operation at given time, will clog all the bandwidth available in the world. In nutshell, unchecked advent of P2P is not only dangerous for the existence of creative industry but also for Internet itself.

Phishing:

In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. ***

Process is like a wizard showing you a trick. All is mirage with not a single speck of truth in it. An email in your account, or instant message or url redirect will take you a trustworthy site replica. As the page looks like yahoo (e.g.) home page or your bank account page one will not care to check the website address. User will be asked to fill in sensitive information. On submission, you will give away all your details to an unsolicited source without even knowing who they were. Such kind of activity is very common in spam email you receive from financial institutions or as popup windows on hacked sites.

Phishing is used for getting bank account details, hacking into web accounts, stealing credit card information or social security details. Later this information can be sold  in "personal information market" places as discussed in next section.

Personal information marketplaces

Accounts, personal information details, login credentials which are hacked have to be used someplace by someone. Personal information market places are used to sell or buy such information. New information is available every hour and so are the bidders. These Clandestine markets operate on referral and trust basis, and hackers are the marketeers here. Discussion forums, chat rooms and constantly moving websites serves as the marketplace. Hackers offer their personalized services to the customers for obtaining user accounts and sensitive information. Such marketplaces are real hard to penetrate as gap between trustworthy cheat and non-trustworthy one is hard to come by.

Most of my earlier articles on "Internet Black Markets" contained reference sites but I have intentionally restrained from referring them here, because of the sensitive nature of topics being discussed.

Part 1/4 of this series "Internet black markets" contains the detailed information about domain hoarding, social networking, propaganda market and counterfeit products

Part 2/4 of this series of "Internet black markets" fraudulent activities of online money earning are explored, which include SEO, Traffic generation, plagiarism and click frauds.

Part 4/4 of this series "Internet black markets" the biggest market places of EBay, Twitter and online dating will be explored.

Reference:

***    Wikipedia on Phishing

Courtesy:

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Posted at 12:00AM Sep 23, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[2]