Security News > 2023 > September > The Initial Access Broker Economy: A Deep Dive into Dark Web Hacking Forums

Initial access brokers are cybercriminals that focus on gaining privileged IT access to corporate environments, which they then auction off on specialized dark web forums.

We wanted to better understand how IABs operate, so we did the only natural thing and spent weeks painstakingly translating posts from Russian into English to conduct an in-depth analysis on the corporate access economy.

Access Type/Тип доступа: Describes the type of access obtained, most commonly RDP or VPN access.

Access to corporate IT environments is stunningly cheap; the average price to purchase access to a corporate IT environment across all samples in our data set was $4,699.

Key Takeaway: Most initial access broker posts on the forum Exploit sell access to U.S., UK, and Australian companies.

The most common type of access sold was access to Remote Desktop Protocol with administrator privileges, a key vector for ransomware attacks.

News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/the-initial-access-broker-economy-a-deep-dive-into-dark-web-hacking-forums/