Trend Micro Research Reveals Top Tactics to Disrupt Underground Hosting Businesses

Threat correlation and visibility creates effective means to render cybercrime profitless

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HONG
KONG, CHINA - Media OutReach - 13 October
2020 - Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), the leader in cloud security, today released key ways to identify and
disrupt criminal market operations to conclude a three-part report series on
the underground hosting market. In the report, researchers outline the
infrastructure business approaches of attackers to help security teams and law
enforcement agencies best recognize, defend against, and disrupt them.

 

Understanding criminal operations, motivations and
business models is key to dismantling the bulletproof hosting industry on which
the majority of global cybercrime is built.

 

“Increasingly, mature organizations have SOC and
XDR capabilities, which means security teams today have moved into the realm of
also being investigators,” said Robert McArdle, director of forward-looking
threat research at Trend Micro. “At that level of security sophistication, you
need to understand how the criminals operate to strategically defend against
attackers. We hope this report provides insight into cybercriminal operations
that can prove actionable for organizations and ultimately make hosters lose
profits.”

 

Bulletproof hosters (BPH) are the root of
cybercriminal infrastructure and therefore use a sophisticated business model
to outlast takedown efforts. These include flexibility, professionalism and
offering a range of services to cater to an array of customer needs.

 

The report details several effective methods to
help investigators identify underground hosters, including:

• Identify which
  IP ranges are in public block deny lists, or those associated with a large
  number of public abuse requests, as those may be indicative of BPH.
• Analyze autonomous system behavior and peering
  information patterns to flag activity that is likely associated to BPH.
• Once one BPH host has been detected,
  use machine fingerprinting to detect others that may be linked to the same
  provider.

 

The report also lists methods for law enforcement
agencies and businesses to disrupt underground hosting businesses, without
necessarily needing to identify or takedown their servers. These include:

 

• Submit properly documented abuse
  requests to the suspected underground hosting provider and upstream peers.
• Add BPH network ranges to
  well-established deny lists.
• Increase the operational costs of the
  BPH, to impair business stability.
• Undermine the
  reputation of the BPH on the cybercrime underground: perhaps via covert accounts that call into
  question the security of the criminal hosting provider or discuss possible
  collaboration with authorities.

 

To read the full report, please visit: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hk/security/news/cybercrime-and-digital-threats/inside-the-bulletproof-hosting-business-cybercrime-methods-opsec.

 

About Trend Micro

Trend Micro, a
global leader in cybersecurity, helps make the world safe for exchanging
digital information. Leveraging over 30 years of security expertise, global
threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro enables resilience for
businesses, governments, and consumers with connected solutions across cloud
workloads, endpoints, email, IIoT, and networks. Our XGen™ security strategy
powers our solutions with a cross-generational blend of threat-defense
techniques that are optimized for key environments and leverage shared threat
intelligence for better, faster protection. With over 6,700 employees in 65
countries, and the world’s most advanced global threat research and
intelligence, Trend Micro enables organizations to secure their connected world www.trendmicro.com.hk.