As Cybercrooks Specialize, More Snooping, Less Smash and Grab

A study of 159 compromised email accounts by Barracuda and UC Berkeley finds cybercriminal specialization: many compromises are short-lived yet a significant portion persist for a week or more, attackers frequently sell access or intelligence (31% of cases involved a different actor exploiting an account), and password reuse contributed to 20% of compromises; researchers recommend post-compromise tooling, forensics, and automated incident response to contain email account takeovers.