Children know that picking a good team can be the key to success on the playground. For example, in choosing a team for a pickup basketball game, a young “captain” will try to pick the most capable individuals available to form a unit that can excel at dribbling, passing, shooting, defending, and rebounding.
Cybercrime is not child’s play. However, organized cyber criminals use a similar approach to build their gangs: they assemble groups of specialists who collaboratively target and profit from victims’ information, assets, and systems. Among other things, sophisticated cybercrime groups—which have the advantage of knowing exactly what attacks they intend to launch—include specialists to hack into systems, write malware, conduct social engineering, navigate inside networks, extract data, and/or launder money.
