It seems China's state-supported hackers are being overshadowed by the black hat scene as the latter appears to have doubled in size – with some brazen crackers turning to carding the nation's wealthiest.

A Trend Micro report dubbed The Chinese Underground in 2013 [PDF] issued this week reveals the black hat hacking scene has rapidly grown since 2011 with the number of bad guys doubling by 2013 and estimates it would more than triple by the end of this year.

Chief security officer Tom Kellerman told Dark Reading the crackers were targeting the nations' "bourgeois, nouveau-riche Chinese elite who have profited from capitalism" as well as those in other countries.

"[Beijing] has been focused externally ... on information dominance and espionage," Kellerman told the publication.

"[The black hats] who are not beholden to the regime ... believe money is god and believe that crime has evolved with technology."

Trend Micro's metrics are based on 1.4 million public messages supposedly sent by crims over the Chinese messaging service QQ. That volume of messages is said to represent a doubling in hacker chatter in the last 10 months of 2013 compared with the same period in 2012, threat researcher Lion Gu said.

"The Chinese underground has continued to grow [and] is still highly profitable, the cost of connectivity and hardware continues to fall, and there are more and more users with poor security precautions in place," Gu said.

"In short, it is a good time to be a cyber criminal in China. So long as there is money to be made, more people may be tempted to become online crooks themselves."

The report also found malware was being increasingly targeted at mobile users in keeping with the global migration from desktops to smartmobes and fondelslabs.

Trend maintains a keen interest in the Chinese and Russian criminal underground markets. Earlier this year, the company issued a report examining attempts by the Middle Kingdom's cyber punks to pwn the mobile market by stating it was full of dirt cheap attack tools used to defraud victims.

In 2012, the firm reported on the size and structure of the nation's cyber underworld, stating it affected about a quarter of the country's internet users.

The company's next target is Brazil, which it will probe for the first time later this year in the hope of examining its digital criminal underground. ®