What’s the point of having a state-of-the art hacker tool if no one is going to use it?
For this the hackers turn to the marketing department.
The aforementioned phishing kit was advertised in different underground hacker forums.
But even more mainstream venues are used.
For example, last month Damballa uncovered the IMDDOS botnet.
The operators of the botnet had actually set up a public facing Web site offering their service - performing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against the target of the user’s choice.
All the user had to do was to go to that certain website to subscribe to the service.
Like any successful business, it is not enough to just advertise.
To really penetrate the market, you need to show you know your stuff.
And hackers are even using YouTube as a channel to promote their skills.
Video tutorials of hacks are common.
For instance, a YouTube tutorial of an XSS attack was uploaded to YouTube in 2007.
The 2010 XSS attack campaign mentioned earlier, used nearly identical steps to perform the attack.