The cyberattacks that led to the massive data breach at Target last year marked the “coming of age” for a black-market service industry that caters to malicious hackers and identity thieves, computer security company McAfee Labs said in a quarterly report Monday.
That industry allowed the thieves to not only buy custom-made malware for the theft, but also to quickly sell credit card numbers from 40 million shoppers affected by the breach. The thieves sold the numbers through online back-channels that security experts call the “dark Web,” the company said.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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