Hackers Look for Easy Money in Victim Email Inboxes

A recent article published by independent security researcher Brian Krebs shed light on a long-term scheme run by a group of hackers, to steal gift cards from victim email inboxes.

Krebs used information supplied by a source who requested to remain anonymous but had hooks into a number of networks used by the hacker group. The discoveries made are very intriguing.

In a landscape where a major part of cyber security news releases are focused on ransomware, it is a little strange to see an examination of a different approach by hackers. The group described by Krebs' anonymous source is playing the long game - they are brute-forcing their way into as many email accounts as they can, but once in, they keep a very low profile.

The hackers attempt to hack into millions of email accounts each day, targeting almost all major email providers. Even though the conversion rate of successful breaches against total attempts is tiny - somewhere around 0.1%, this still means tens of thousands of breached accounts per day, simply because the automated scripts the hackers use allow them to attempt to get into millions of emails each day.

Once they have found their way into victims' inboxes, the hackers keep a very low profile and run another script that goes through inboxes, looking for specific keywords. The bad actors are looking for gift cards and similar loyalty program reward cards that they can steal, and then re-sell online.

The report states that similar digital gift cards sell for roughly 80% of their face value. With thousands of breached accounts to scan each day, the hackers are likely making a good bit of money with their criminal activities.

The thing that has helped this particular group keep doing this over the course of around three years is that the hackers keep a very low profile. There are no attempts to abuse the breached email accounts in any other way - no phishing out of contacts, no exploiting the breached account to use it like a spambot. All that this particular group of hackers cares for is the gift and loyalty program cards.

This low-profile approach focused on minimizing their footprint and traces on the victim accounts has allowed this group to thrive for a long time and steer clear of any intervention on part of the authorities, who are always more engaged in higher-profile attacks.