Tag Archives: market

Chip producer ARM — major IoT player?

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ARM ChipUK company ARM Holdings appears to be backing up its claims as a major processor design player in the Internet of Things (IoT) market. ARM signed 53 licenses for processor designs compared with 26 the previous year.

Smart phones to IoT

While ARM is the chip designer behind the vast majority of the smart phones in the world, it is also aggressively entering the machine-to-machine market, a significant subset of the Internet of Things.

ARM further signaled its interest in Internet of Things marketshare with its purchase of Offspark last week, an IoT security firm. The company is also moving into server technology which, given the symbiotic relationship of IoT and the Cloud, could be a winning combination. ARM produced 12 billion chips in 2014.

Over 25 IoT devices per person on the planet

While some predict ARM might be slowing because of projected reduced smart phone sales, projections of 25 plus networked computing devices per person on the Earth, might give ARM plenty of room to work.

Getting more for your (cybercriminal) dollar

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A couple of years ago $300 might have bought you, if you’re a cybercriminal, the online credentials to access a bank account with maybe $7,000 in it.  Today $300 can get you access (username and password) to an account with well over $100,000 in it according to research from Dell SecureWorks. Prices are dropping.  Which means that more bad guys can get it.

Speculation for the price drop is that a glut exists in the market subsequent to several large scale data breaches over the past year. This condition is expected to last for some time.

Personal identities comprised of information such as name, SSN, date of birth, etc are known as ‘fullz’.  European fullz seem to sell for more than US citizen fullz.  Maybe there is less availability of European stolen identities?

I was Googling ‘fullz’ to find a couple of different definitions, but I kept coming across advertisements to sell fullz, complete with price lists. At first, I thought I had stumbled across some secret cybercriminal stash of online identities, but they’re everywhere.  Here are snippets of some of the ones that I ran across (ie 1st page of a Google search — I didn’t have to dig for these).

fullz4

[click to enlarge]

fullz1 fullz2 fullz3

Joe Stewart with Dell SecureWorks and independent researcher David Shear also report these prices for purchasing botnets (networks of pre-compromised computers from which the buyer can deliver a wide variety of malware options):

  • 1,000 bots = $20
  • 5,000 bots= $90
  • 10,000 bots = $160
  • 15,000 bots = $250

Customers shopping for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks can expect rates similar to these:

  • DDoS Attacks Per hour = $3-$5
  • DDoS Attacks Per Day = $90-$100
  • DDoS Attacks per Week = $400-600

These prices kind of bum me out because they are llloowww.

We hear all of the time that cybercrime and cyberattacks are terrible and getting worse.  These numbers, though, drive that point home — it’s just not hard to buy into this game.