Most people won't like this article, mostly due to me having a little dig at the FBI. This isn't because I have some personal vendetta against them, it's mostly due to me witnessing the events that have happened in the past week, and disliking them. Most of the community has taken the news quite well, as the media doesn't point out, Blackshades was one of them products
beginners used when getting into infecting users. The prime target for this product was a young teenager looking to become a big hacker. You are correct in saying it was used to hack into Miss Teen USA, which later led to the user holding her ransom because he had captured nudes. One of the big points in this story was that he was a Californian computer science school student. A relatively young adult who is fairly inexperienced in what he did, he tried to get her to contact him via the popular service Skype.
Whatever you say about Blackshades it, to me, was an attractive product to
skids. Easy to use, enough function for the common user, and not too expensive for their mums to pay with their PayPal. And before you say, yes, I did cover
two Blackshades products on my channel, I did not infect anyone with it, and was used to educate people on the products, as it was never "labelled" illegal then. It had a large following of users on the ever popular "hacking" forum hackforums (wink wink). It seemed like the right thing to do, in which I could drive more views to my channel, and do not regret my choice, because it did.
When a few members on HackForums reported back that they had been raided, there was a lot of panic. A lot of members started to get worried, and started to ask a lot of questions. You could see by the posts that were made, how young the users were and how scared they were. I'm not trying to reach out to Blackshades purchasers one bit, I'm trying to shed new light into what seems like FBI's idea of a successful day. Excuse me, but even if, to me, you're over inflated facts about Blackshades are true, I feel like you're missing on a important opportunity. The product was marketed in a forum notoriously filled with kids just starting out, instead of scaring the shit out of kids because of their stupid mistakes, I thought you would be able to somehow convert their interest on the white side of things, make Cyber Security
actually interesting for the younger generation. And when I say this, I'm not having a go at current course content, or educators currently within the system helping students learn. I'm talking about making it an attractive career opportunity, for various forum users around the world.
What Blackshades did for young users is create knowledge of how basic Remote Administration Tools are used, the FBI and services alike could of utilised this opportunity to find a talent pool. Only a few months back I remember stories stating a shortage in Cyber Security professionals, why not train young kids who are interested in this sort of thing? I'm not saying any of these forum users are angels, no one is, but the money used in this operation could of been used to contact and train these individuals to give them motivation into moving to
the other side of computer security.
