Dive Brief:

• Cybercriminals worldwide are increasingly cooperating to improve malware tools and techniques, according to a report released by Kaspersky Lab this week. 
• Researchers found Brazilian and Russian cybercriminals are visiting each other's underground criminal forums to buy and sell malware, as well as to offer both services and advice.
• Kaspersky Lab said this demonstrates an "evolution," as different forms of malicious software were once developed in isolation from one another.

Dive Insight:

Rather than lone wolf hackers staked out in a basement, cyberattackers are moving to coordinate and work in groups. Cyber criminals are working together, ignoring both language and geographic barriers to create more efficient targeting tools. IBM’s annual threat report found that cybercriminals are consistently using large teams of developers to create powerful malware to attack large numbers of organizations. 

"We have sufficient evidence that Brazilian criminals are cooperating with the Eastern European gangs involved with ZeuS, SpyEye and other malware created in the region," Thiago Marques, a security researcher at Kaspersky said in a blog post. "We believe this is only the tip of the iceberg."

Researchers suggest this couldn't have happened without some form of cooperation between hackers in the two countries.

In February, a group of researchers said the group of people that hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014 has since carried out a large number of attacks against a variety of other organizations and that evidence suggests Lazarus is a "well-structured, well-resourced and highly motivated organization.”