Underground market of phishing kits is booming, prices skyrocketed in 2019 by 149%

guest · Apr 15, 2020

Phishing kit prices skyrocketed in 2019 by 149%
The average price for a phishing kit in 2019 was $304, up from $122 recorded in 2018
April 15, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/phishing-kit-prices-skyrocketed-in-2019-by-149/

The average price of a phishing kit sold on cybercrime markets has gone up in 2019 by 149%, cybersecurity firm Group-IB said today.

In a report shared with ZDNet and which will go live later today, the company said it compiled these numbers by analyzing ads posted on known cybercrime markets and hacking forums.
Group-IB says the average price for phishing kits sold on the cybercrime underground in 2019 has skyrocketed to $304 on average last year, up from only $122 recorded in 2018.

Of the 16,200 phishing kits Group-IB identified and tracked in 2019, the company said the most targeted login pages were for Amazon, Google, Instagram, Office 365, and PayPal.
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Prices for phishing kits went up in 2019 because phishing kits have had to become more complex as they had to constantly adapt to find new ways to bypass phishing protections.

Furthermore, there are also other reasons. Buyers, for example, are also learning from their past mistakes. Cheap or free phishing kits often contain backdoors, so most buyers have now learned to go for high-value products rather than free tools, which indirectly increases the demand, and phishing kit prices also go up.

In other words, phishing kit prices going up in 2019 is excellent news, as this means email security systems are getting better at detecting attacks.
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Group-IB: How much is the phish? Underground market of phishing kits is booming — Group-IB

Group-IB, a Singapore-based cybersecurity company, has found out that phishing kits are the new bestsellers of the underground market, with the number of phishing kit ads on underground forums and their sellers having doubled in 2019 compared to the previous year.

Phishing kits represent archive files with a set of scripts that ensure the work of a phishing website. This toolset enables attackers with modest programming skills carry out massive malicious campaigns, which is the reason for why they represent a point of interest for cybersecurity researchers.

“Phishing kit creators are the driving force of this criminal marketplace – one individual might be behind the creation of hundreds of phishing pages and, even worse, behind the compromise of the personal information of thousands of people,” Group-IB CTO and Head of Threat Hunting Intelligence team Dmitry Volkov said.
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guest · Jul 10, 2020

Over 1,300 phishing kits for sale on hacker forum
July 10, 2020
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-1-300-phishing-kits-for-sale-on-hacker-forum/

A member of a hacker forum is looking to make over $30,000 from selling a huge collection of more than 1,300 phishing kits.
The malicious trove is part of the seller’s collection and covers top-rated websites, banks, and financial organizations.
Large variety of targets
At $25 per phishing kit, the seller is looking to make at least $32,500 if they manage to sell the entire cache. They could make more if there are multiple buyers.
According to the advertisement, the phishing kits (PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript) are unique and the size of the entire cache compressed is 3.3GB, each one being a ZIP archive.

Bank Security told BleepingComputer that the seller shared with them that a good part of the collection targets the top 500 websites, including some less known banks and financial organizations.
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While most of the kits may be collected from the wild - as per the seller’s post, some of them still have the hacker’s email address - in some cases, the files are publicly available, or have double entries. Even so, 1,300 is an impressive number that could hide a few gems.
At $25 apiece, the price is far from being steep, which may indicate that the kits are not of the best quality. In 2019, phishing kits sold on average for $304, the lowest price being $20, and the most expensive ones having a price tag of $880, according to a report from Group-IB in mid-April.
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guest · Oct 12, 2020

The Market for Phishing Kits
October 12, 2020
https://blog.knowbe4.com/the-market-for-phishing-kits

Inexperienced cybercriminals can easily find places to buy phishing kits in the open, on the “surface web” (as opposed to the deep or dark web), according to Jan Kopriva at the SANS Internet Storm Center.

Kopriva set out to see how many of these kits he could find for sale on popular websites, and was able to find more than a hundred on YouTube alone after a single search. These YouTube videos offered demonstrations of the phishing kits’ functionality and pointed users to where they could purchase the kits.

“Of the 104 kits, 18 were offered free of charge (and at least one of these was backdoored - this wasn't mentioned in the video description so it was probably intended as a surprise bonus feature),” Kopriva writes.
“For 76 of them, price was available by e-mail/ICQ/Telegram/Facebook only and the 10 remaining ones ranged in price from $10 to $100. The 86 ‘commercial’ phishing kits were offered by 21 sellers, with the most prolific one of them being responsible for 22 different scam pages.”
Kopriva’s research demonstrates how easy it’s become for aspiring criminals to launch effective phishing attacks with minimal technical skills.
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The SANS Internet Storm Center has the story.
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Underground market of phishing kits is booming, prices skyrocketed in 2019 by 149%

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