Cyber-criminals don't need Technical Skills

By Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera


Earlier this month, Spanish authorities and security researchers worked together to track down and capture three Spanish men behind the Mariposa botnet, a network of almost 13 million computers across 190 countries.

The breaches discovered were far-reaching. The botnet compromised systems across several Fortune 1000 companies and 40 financial institutions. At the time of his arrest, one of the botnet operators possessed sensitive information about approximately 800,000 victims.

The three men, authorities said, were no computer geniuses.

"These people didn't have any advanced hacker skills," said Sean-Paul Correll, researcher at Panda Security, one of the firms involved in the investigations. "They just had resources available to them online and were able to take advantage of them to build this network."

Once the exclusive realm of highly technical geeks, the doors to the dark world of cybercrime have cracked wide open to individuals with basic computer skills thanks to easy-to-use software that experts say have become widely available in the last three or four years and made hacking as simple as clicking on a checkbox.

Almost anyone can operate a botnet through simple commands on self-explanatory, Web-based programs. As a result, the number of amateur botmasters is on the rise.

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