Cybercriminals outpacing authorities

[Tami]

Cybercriminals outpacing authorities: Report

by Jack Kapica

Criminals operating in cyberspace are becoming more sophisticated than the legal systems intended to stop them, a new report on cybercrime from McAfee Inc.

The chances of being caught are also favourable to criminals, with only 5 per cent of them standing a chance of being caught and convicted.

"Many police forces still lack the capability to operate effectively in cyberspace," says the McAfee Virtual Criminology Report.

"Many countries still lack an adequate legal framework for the deterrence and punishment of cybercrimes or rely on an uneven patchwork of legislation," the report says. "Disagreement over what constitutes a crime; inadequate, uneven, or absent authorities for governments to investigate and prosecute cybercrime; and paper-based procedures for international co-operation have at times hampered international co-operation on cybercrime."

McAfee's security experts say that cybercrime is also mirroring traditional off-line criminal activity, with an estimated 85 per cent of malicious software written purely for profit.

McAfee says that the Internet changed dramatically in 2000, when cybercrime ceased to be a recreational activity and started to become organized with a "new class" of criminals. The reason: cybercrime has become big business, with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation estimating it as costing some $400-billion (U.S.) last year.

Among the most prominent Internet crimes are extortion, damage to reputations, fraud, money laundering and theft of both money and identity.

The anonymity and global connectivity of the Internet allows crimes to be committed across national borders or from different continents, the report says, and that criminals do not need to be physically present to commit the crime, reducing the risk of capture and prosecution. And computers make their job easier by carrying out the criminal acts automatically, at high speed and attacking a large number of victims at once, making the action harder to track and prosecute.

The report breaks cybercrime into two broad areas, one exploiting vulnerabilities in operating systems and the other involving social engineering, in which the victim is tricked into giving valuable information to the villain.

Automation means also that it costs only pennies for a criminal to send out millions of infected e-mail messages in only a few minutes, and can hope to gain entry to and control of hundreds of insufficiently protected computers as a result.

The weapon of choice for criminal activity involves turning thousands of computers into a network of devices that all attack simultaneously on command — a network of compromised machines infected by worms or viruses known as a "bot net."

"Those who succeed in creating bot-nets have created a very powerful tool for crime," McAfee says. "Spammers, hackers and other cybercriminals are acquiring or renting bot nets — some owners will rent their networks to others for as little as $200 to $300 an hour."

The most damaging form of cybercrime uses a two-phase attack, the report says. "The first phase of the attack is to locate and covertly control as many computers as possible. The second phase is to use this unwitting network of computers for criminal purposes."

The [url=\"http://www.mcafeesecurity.com/us/local_content/misc/mcafee_na_virtual_criminology_report.pdf\"][u]report[/u][/url], made available on-line by McAfee, is a summary of the breadth and scope of cybercrime that comes to a gloomy conclusion. It forecasts increasing criminal activity involving cellphones and other mobile devices, Voice over Internet (VoIP) telephones, Wi-Fi networks and phishing and identity theft.

"The move to a networked world and an information economy only increases the incentives for cybercriminals and the scope for their activities," the report concludes. "As people and companies rely more and more on the Internet to do business, and as an essential means of communication, the more opportunity there is for cybercriminals to make money illegally — and the greater the risk of malicious attacks on users."

[url=\"http://www.globetechnology.com\"][u]source: Globe Technology[/u][/url]