By the Numbers: Armor’s Black Market Report: A Look Inside the Dark Web

Cloud cybersecurity vendor Armor recently released “The Black Market Report: A Look Inside the Dark Web” for Q1 of 2018. The findings it contains are fascinating and terrifying in equal measure.

The Dark Web is a subset of the Deep Web—internet sites not indexed by search engines such as Google and Yahoo—where black market forums are conducted outside the eyes of the law. To even access the Dark Web, you would need specialized anonymization software or services. After that, many of the forums require a serious verification process and an exclusive invitation before allowing access. It is within these buried forums that malicious hacking products and services are bought and sold.

The Dark Web sellers of hacking services can be seen as dark parallels to cybersecurity solutions providers because of the professionalism they display. They have their own quality standards, money-back guarantees, and some even offer basic support for their malicious codes (usually sold at a higher cost and delivered via anonymized channels). Tutorials for the inexperienced threat actor are available as well.

Here is a smattering of the prices Armor discovered for illegal services or information on the Dark Web black market. Please keep in mind these are not definitive prices; haggling and price competition exist even in hacking underworld:

$10—Stolen U.S. credit card data.

$40-$200—Stolen personal identifying information.

$15—A bundle of 1,000 stolen Instagram accounts.

$10—A one hour DDoS attack on an enterprise.

$200—A day long DDoS attack.

$80—One day rental of the Disdian exploit kit

$500—One week rental of Disdain.

$1,400—One month rental.

$750—One month rental of Blow-bot botnet.

$1,200—One month rental of the fully featured Blow-bot

$100 to $150—One month of support services for Blow-bot, respectively.

$1,000—Microsoft Office exploit builder for newcomers.

$5 to $50—Hacking tutorial

$200—A remote access trojan license.

$50—Password Stealer (you can see why we aren’t in favor of them).

>$1.3 billion—The total financial loss as a result of cybercrime in the U.S. alone.

The unifying principle behind all of these Dark Web products, however? They are all dangerously inexpensive. None of them are out of reach for a modest hacking budget, which means that a worrying number of hackers may have serious assistance in their malicious acts…which could spell disaster for your enterprise.  

This only scratches the surface of this dive into the Dark Web. You can download the full report from Armor Defense here.