A recent campaign from an Indian hack-for-hire operator was observed targeting an IT company in Cyprus, an education institution in Nigeria, a fintech company in the Balkans and a shopping company in Israel. The breadth of targets in hack-for-hire campaigns stands in contrast to many government-backed operations, which often have a clearer delineation of mission and targets.

We have also observed Indian hack-for-hire firms work with freelance actors not directly employed by the firms themselves. This is detailed in depth in today’s Reuters investigation into the Indian hack-for-hire ecosystem. Some hack-for-hire attackers openly advertise their products and services to anyone willing to pay, while others operate more discreetly selling to a limited audience.įor example, TAG has observed Indian hack-for-hire firms work with third party private investigative services - intermediaries that reach out for services when a client requires them - and provide data exfiltrated from a successful operation. The hack-for-hire landscape is fluid, both in how the attackers organize themselves and in the wide range of targets they pursue in a single campaign at the behest of disparate clients. To help users and defenders, we will provide examples of the hack-for-hire ecosystem from India, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates and context around their capabilities and persistence mechanisms.

They also conduct corporate espionage, handily obscuring their clients’ role. We have seen hack-for-hire groups target human rights and political activists, journalists, and other high-risk users around the world, putting their privacy, safety and security at risk. Both, however, enable attacks by those who would otherwise lack the capabilities to do so. They target a wide range of users and opportunistically take advantage of known security flaws when undertaking their campaigns. In contrast to commercial surveillance vendors, who we generally observe selling a capability for the end user to operate, hack-for-hire firms conduct attacks themselves. Today, we're sharing intelligence on a segment of attackers we call hack-for-hire, whose niche focuses on compromising accounts and exfiltrating data as a service. As part of TAG's mission to counter serious threats to Google and our users, we've published analysis on a range of persistent threats including government-backed attackers, commercial surveillance vendors, and serious criminal operators.

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