The year 2020 has seen an important increase in reselling hacked network access. It only takes one workstation inside your company, for a hacker to come in. Once inside, he can then resell the entry path to other cybercriminals. This illustrates the importance of protecting your business network, now more than ever.

A B2B Offer in Cyber Criminality

Cyber criminals are enlarging their offer, as they have now built themselves their own network of corporate clients, to whom they sell entryways into other corporations. That is what a study from Group IB has shown. Although this is not entirely new, it has grown importantly this year. So much, that it has become a problem as serious as ransomware.

Today, if you don’t protect your company with a good VPN service provider, your IT Department is bound to find itself in trouble. Encrypting communication coming in and going out of the servers is crucial to protect it from hackers and other kind of cyber criminals. You can learn more about the advantages and uses of VPN by watching Perimeter 81 videos on YouTube.

Selling Hacked Network Access: A Growing Trend

The current trend in cyber criminality is to sell hacked access to corporate networks. To do so, they find companies that they can infiltrate through one computer. That is why it can be so complicated for a company to protect itself. All it takes is one individual, connected to its network, that hasn’t turned on its VPN, for a hacker to find an entry door into the system. Of course, firms also use other means to protect themselves from viruses and malware, but the VPN is often the first line of defense.

Because some employees don’t update their software regularly, they create a weakness in the system. Once the hacker is inside, it opens a way in, which it then resells to other cybercriminals or corporations. They benefit from their purchase by stealing data, installing ransomware and other malicious activities.

The reason why IG Group talks about an important increase this year, is that it was multiplied 2.6 times, only between the second half of 2019 and the first half of 2020. In 2018, IG Group identified 37 resellers, when in 2020 it counted 63. It is quite a large network, considering that they all resell the information to multiple clients.

It is impossible not to spend time and money on cyber security for a company today. Otherwise, their whole operation could be compromised in one, single cyber-attack.