[Infowarrior] - Heavy demand for multilingual hackers in global spam market

[Richard Forno]

Heavy demand for multilingual hackers in global spam market

By Joel Hruska | Published: February 23, 2008 - 10:50AM CT

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080223-heavy-demand-for-multilingual-
hackers-in-global-spam-market.html

Being multilingual in the computer industry used to mean a person could
program in C, Cobol, and Fortran, but demand for programmers hackers who can
speak additional real-world languages is apparently on the rise. Crafting
malware has become big business on the global market. As a recent report
from McAfee details, sophisticated malware authors are increasingly being
hired to craft country-, language-, company-, and software-specific attacks.
Lingual skills are a crucial part of pulling off such focused attacks, and
companies are looking to hire people who can speak the language of their
targets. Obvious misspellings or grammatical errors are one of the biggest
clues that an e-mail or web site isn't legitimate, and it's a flaw that
those in the industry would like to repair.

Advertisements for virus authors fluent in languages from Japanese to
Portuguese are increasingly showing up online. Such recruiting efforts are
finding traction thanks partly to the economic conditions in nations like
China and Russia. Both countries have a surplus of skilled coders who lack
regular work, or possibly any work at all. Laws against cybercrime are also
more lax in these and other developing nations.

The demise of the Russian Business Network (once a hotbed of illegal
activity) may have also brought an increasingly global focus to the Russian
spyware market. Russia has surpassed China to become the largest generator
of spam and other malware, but the death of the RBN has forced smaller
operators to seek hosting in a number of Asian countries.

If you're going to host malicious servers in another country, it only makes
sense to offer its citizens the gifts of herbal enhancements and Nigerian
banking deals that make the rest of us so happy‹but if you're going to bring
such presents to another nation, you have to know the local language. The
Russian Mafia's interest in cybercrime is also reportedly growing‹a fact
that could have significant repercussions for the future of malware business
on a global scale.

The rise of multilingualism and the growth of country-specific attacks could
have other ramifications in additional simply exposing new users to a host
of spam in their own language. Earlier this year we discussed the case of an
Estonian student who launched a series of DDoS attacks against his country's
web sites as a method of protest. The incident contributed to tensions
between Estonia and Russia when the former blamed the latter for the
attacks. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine politicians or other
powerful individuals within a nation taking similar measures in order to
influence national policy.