Our other trends are here:

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On December 14th, Imperva's CTO Amichai Shulman will be hosting a webinar, talking you through the ADC's predictions.  To register, click here.

Trend #2:  The Rise of the Middle Man

In 2010, we predicted the industrialization of hacking.  What is the impact of industrialization to hacker’s business models?  In 2012, with the increased supply and demand for compromised machines, as well as for sensitive corporate info, we predict the rise to a new cyber crime job role: the broker. This individual is responsible to match the buyers of stolen data, or compromised machines (aka “bots”), with the sellers of the data (or bot renters).  In the same way stocks and investors gave rise to stock markets, hackers need a middle man.

The success of bot herding opened up a large market where lots of hackers have many corporate machines under their control, each potentially holding a vast amount of data. However, waiting for individuals to approach and buy this type of data from them is simply too much of a slow and ineffective approach – causing the hackers to be a victim of their own success.  Instead, we are seeing that this situation actually opens up the wholesale opportunity for a middleman to bridge this gap.