To help new ‘entrepreneurs’ or beginners interested in a life of cybercrime, some Brazilian bad guys started to offer paid courses. Others went even further, creating a Cybercrime school to sell the necessary skills to anyone who fancies a life of computer crime but lacks the technical know-how.
A number of different courses are offered, and while some seem like legitimate ones — how to become a designer, a Web designer, a hacker, a programmer — others not so much as they offer to teach how to become a ‘banker,’ a defacer or a spammer,
A School for Cybercrime: How to Become a Black Hat
by Fabio Assolini
https://securelist.com/a-school-for-cybercrime-how-to-become-a-black-hat-30/32084/
Life looks good for Brazilian hackers: the absence of a specific law against cybercrime leaves them feeling so invulnerable that the bad guys are shameless about publicizing their thefts and showing off the profits of a life of crime. We showed some of this in a presentation
at the latest Virus Bulletin Conference, and it’s commonplace to find YouTube clips of Brazilian bankers and carders reveling in their ill-gotten gains and rubbing their easy money in the faces of hard-up victims (there’s one example here, and several more out there). It’s also common to find bad guys’ profiles on social networks such as Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Everything is done out in the open, without fear of being caught.
To help new “entrepreneurs” or beginners interested in a life of cybercrime, some Brazilian bad guys started to offer paid courses. Others went even further, creating a Cybercrime school to sell the necessary skills to anyone who fancies a life of computer crime but lacks the technical know-how. On a website dedicated to selling these courses and promoting the “school”, a careful search turns up courses like “How to be a Banker”, “Kit Spammer” or “How to be a Defacer”.
Each course is a well-designed package, with full details of the “curriculum” studied. “How to become a Banker 101” says:
They also offer a course for spammers where you can learn about all the techniques needed to do it effectively. This comes with a gift: a list containing 60 million email addresses to start spamming immediately:
All the courses can be purchased on-line, or if you want, you can watch classes in person. The address of the “school” is also published on the website:
Brazilian financial institutions reported losses of R$ 685 million (around US $380 million) in the first half of 2011 as a result of paying compensation to internet banking clients who lost money. I think its high time Brazilian politicians approve a national law against local cybercrime to enable the police to step up the battle against cybercrime. With the computer criminals publically flouting their ill-gotten gains, we need a more radical and energetic campaign to stop them.