You know what secretly holds much of the financially-oriented cybercrime world together? It's the relatively few evil code wizards who are really good at making malware look benign. They call them cryptors, or encryptors, and their services are known as "crypting."
Crypting is a core method by which malware purveyors try to evade antivirus and security tools, and virtually all serious malware that is deployed for use in data stealing at some point needs to be crypted. Because if you're not doing stuff to obfuscate your malware before sending it out, it's probably going to mostly get caught by antivirus. So, if you're not crypting it yourself (challenging), you probably need to pay someone else to do that.
There are countless cybercriminals who've hung out their shingles as crypting service providers, but most of these people are really not very good at what they do, and are soon out of business. Still, there are a fair number of crypting services that have been around for a while and do a passable job, with somewhat unreliable results.
However, it's crazy how many different big time cybercrime outfits turn to a fairly small number of super-scary crytpers who've been doing malware a LONG time (15-20+ years).
One thing I have discovered in all my lurking on the forums is that the best cryptors are independent contractors who tend to have arrangements with multiple, often competing cybercriminal operations.
In short, if you want to really kneecap a number of cybercrime enterprises all at once, go after the top crypting service providers, and take them off the board.
