Wednesday, May 22, 2019

UCSD, Google Study Finds Many Online Hacking Services Are Frauds

A new, academic study--conducted by UC San Diego and Google--has jumped into the world of "hacking for profit", running a study on hacking-for-hire services and their charges and success in hacking into a set of Google Gmail accounts. The study, published by UCSD, found that--for the most part--most hacking services are scams. That said, of the 27 hacking services engaged by the study, five actually did end up launching attacks against test Gmail accounts, which were "honeypots" set up in conjunction with Google. The price for all that alleged hacking? The services charged from $54 to $384 to hack into different email and account providers, according to researchers.

---