Creator of resources used by thousands of cybercriminals pleads guilty, what does this tell us about the underground crime market?
Both Cryptex and reFUD.me were amongst the most heavily advertised resources on cyber-crime forums at the time, and amongst the most widely used. reFUD.me was a malware-scanning service in reverse, in that it checked 40 of the leading AV products to see if they could detect any given malware sample. The fewer detections, the more effective (and valuable) the malware to the author. Cryptex, and Cryptex Reborn which followed it, would add further value to a malware sample by making it harder for those AV companies to detect: Fully UnDetectable (FUD) was the aim, hence the reFUD.me service name.
So, what does this case tell us of how sophisticated the blackhat industry has become, mimicking the kind of resources developed by security vendors?
