Carderplanet's Mafia-like Structure in Cybercrime Analyzed at Defcon

The Web site offered to sell stolen credit card information for US$100, but it was the title of the poster that caught FBI agent Thomas X Grasso Jr.'s attention. The cybercriminal identified himself as a "Capo di capo" -- a boss of bosses, in Mafia parlance. As money has become the driving force behind online threats, cyber criminals have been taking a page from organized crime, adopting the same kind of organizational structures as these older crime groups, Grasso told an audience Friday at the Defcon hacker conference. Defcon immediately follows Black Hat, its sister show.

This organized crime group, Carderplanet, organized themselves into the same structure as the Italian Mafia," said Grasso, a supervisory special agent who works at the National Cyber Forensics & Training Alliance. And the costs of cybercrime are steep. The FBI estimates that it cost the U.S. more than $67 billion last year, Grasso said. To illustrate how sophisticated these cyber criminals are, Grasso then played a slick promotional video offering Carderplanet "business" services. It could easily have been mistaken for a legitimate IT consulting ad.

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