There is a glimmer of light for those who think there’s nothing but darkness ahead for network security.
According to a news report, at least 11 people have been arrested after an investigation by an international law-enforcement crackdown on paid password cracking services.
In the U.S. two of those charged were Arkansas residents allegedly ran a site called needapassword.com, according to court documents filed in Los Angeles. The site accepted requests to hack into accounts hosted by Google, Yahoo and other providers, a report in Ars Tecnica said. The alleged scheme worked like this: The account would be broken into, contents accessed and screenshots sent to customers to prove the account had been hacked. Passwords to the account would be sent to customers for a fee.
Close to 6,000 accounts were compromised, prosecutors allege.
Prosecutors also charged three other Americans, one of whom allegedly paid almost US$22,000 to a Chinese Web site to obtain account passwords.
The news comes after a number of vendors report the number of networks being hacked continues to rise, with at least one warning organizations to just assume their network will be broken into and to therefore prepare by protecting key personal and corporate data.
Admittedly these are only a small number of the people who are ruining the trust that the Internet needs to be a communications and business hub. We can only hope there are more.