A lot of the easy money in Internet attacks is gone. Now you have to do some homework and pick your targets more carefully to get a rewarding rate of return on your crimes.
A report from Cisco says that the nature of attacks on the Internet is changing. Dumb, old-fashioned mass-spammed attacks, and spam itself, are losing their financial motivation and decreasing in frequency.
A Dark Reading report on the Cisco analysis says that targeted attacks cost 5 times as much as a mass attack to pull off, but bring in 10 times the profit. Cisco says the payoff from targeted attacks can be impressive. Targeted attack victims are valued at $80,000 apiece...
