In a professional cybercrime ecosystem, largely resembling that of a legitimate economy, market participants constantly strive to optimize their campaigns, achieve stolen assets liquidity, and most importantly, aim to reach a degree of efficiency that would help them gain market share. Thus, help them secure multiple revenue streams. Despite the increased transparency on the Russian/Easter European underground market — largely thanks to improved social networking courtesy of the reputation-aware cybercriminals wanting to establish themselves as serious vendors — certain newly joining vendors continue being a victim of their market-irrelevant ‘biased exclusiveness’ in terms of the unique value propositon (UVP) presented to the community members. Moreover, in combination with the over-supply of DIY malware/botnet generating tools, next to the release of leaked/cracked source code, positions them in a situation where they can no longer command the high prices for their products/service, like they once did. That’s mainly because the competition is so fierce, that it inevitably results in the commodinitization of these underground market items.
What happens when this commoditization takes place? What are cybercriminals doing with the leaked/cracked source code for sophisticated malware/botnet generating tools? Why would a cybercriminal purposely offer the source code of his malware ‘release’ for sale, especially given that he can continue enjoying its proprietary nature, meaning, a supposedly lower detection rate? Let’s discuss these scenarios through the prism of a recently offered source code of a proprietary spam bot written in Delphi. The bot relies primarily on compromised/automatically registered email accounts as the primary propagation vector for upcoming (malicious) spam campaigns.
