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Inside the Massive Crime Industry That’s Hacking Billion-Dollar Companies
When you download a piece of pirated software, you might also be getting a piece of infostealer malware, and entering a highly complex hacking ecosystem that’s fueling some of the biggest breaches on the planet.
“Malware developers and their clients have realized that personal and corporate credentials, such as login details for online accounts, financial data, and other sensitive information, hold substantial value on the black market,” RussianPanda, an independent security researcher who follows infostealers closely, told 404 Media. Infostealers are not especially hard to write, but the malware developers constantly butt heads with engineers inside tech giants, such as Google, who are trying to stop them from stealing users’ credentials. “It's a little bit of a cat and mouse, but we think that this is a game that we want to play as much as we can if the outcomes remain positive,” Will Harris, staff software engineer on Google Chrome, said.
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