Data security vendor, Imperva, likens the 'industrialisation of hacking' to the way the industrial revolution of the 19th century revolutionised factories.
In its report - the Industrialisation of Hacking - Imperva cites the example of a new hacker scheme that is spawning educational servers worldwide with Viagra ads that go on to infect web users with malware when they visit the infected page on the legitimate education site.
In its study, the company argues that cybercriminals are using industrialised methods to automate an as-yet unreported search engine manipulation scheme that has infected hundreds, possibly thousands of web pages.
Amichai Shulman, the firm's chief technology officer, said that the attack on academic institutions highlights how hacking has become industrialised, infecting servers from institutions as diverse as UC Berkeley, Ohio State and the University of Oxford.
"Ironically, this technique is the most prevalent method used to create havoc in cyberspace, yet remains virtually unknown to the general public", he said.
Shulman added that the technique can be highlighted by visiting Google UK and searching for the terms `Viagra and .ac.'
Key findings of the report include the assertion that, over the years, a clear definition of roles and responsibilities within the hacking community has developed to form a supply chain that resembles a drug cartel.
The division of labour in today's industrialised hacking industry includes:
Researchers: A researcher's sole responsibility is to hunt for vulnerabilities in applications, frameworks, and products and feed their knowledge to malicious organisations for the sake of profit.
Farmers: A farmer's primary responsibility is to maintain and increase the presence of botnets in cyberspace through mass infection.
Dealers: Dealers are tasked with the distribution of malicious payloads.
Technical innovators: Hacking techniques once considered cutting-edge and executed only by savvy experts are now bundled into software tools available for download.
According to Imperva, today, the hacking community typically deploys a two-stage process designed to proliferate botnets and perform mass attacks.
The process splits neatly into search engine manipulations and the execution of mass attacks using automated software.
This latter stage involves dealers inputting email addresses and user names, as well as upload lists of anonymous proxy addresses into specialised software, the same way consumers upload addresses into the computers to print out Christmas card labels.
Automated attack software then performs a password attack by entering commonly used passwords.
In addition, today's industrialised hackers can also input a range of URLs and obtain inadequately protected sensitive data.