Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Part 4: Fighting Cyber Crime





In the past three parts of this Cyber Crime series, you should have gotten the impression that Cyber Crime is unstoppable. It may be unstoppable for now. However, from the United Nations down to individual companies, organizations are becoming aware of the problem and have started dealing with it. Some individuals will attack corporate computers just to make a name for the Cyber Criminals.

This is the continuous war that the United States and western countries are fighting. Click on the link below and see what the FBI has to say about this war.


http://www.fbi.gov/news/videos/fbis-top-cyber-official-discusses-threat

In the past, in the physical world when somebody would rob a bank, the pool of suspects is limited to the number of people in the general vicinity of that bank.

Today when a bank is robbed digitally, virtually, although it is very real for the victims, the money is actually gone; the pool of suspects is limited to the number of people on the face of the earth that have a laptop and an Internet connection, because anybody with an Internet connection potentially can attack any other computer that’s tied to the network. So the barrier of entry is relatively low.

I think that going forward, this is not going away. I mean, we are not backing away from the Internet. We are not going to change technology.

As technology increases, this challenge becomes greater so when I started the threat was really to networks—mostly corporate networks—but since that time we moved into laptops and wireless laptops and then more recently into personal devices, whether it be smart phones, blackberries—those sorts are devices that allow access to the network anytime, everywhere.


In one case, a Cyber Criminal just wanted a job and attacked a large corporation to prove that he was good at his profession. He contacted top management and threatened to change the figures in the Annual Report and threaten to publish it, if he was not given a job. The company contacted the FBI and the FBI sent him an email application for a job in the company. The Cyber Criminal filled it out and sent it in. The next step, the FBI showed up at his front door and insisted on giving him a ride to jail.

Corporations are secretly setting up data bases of people who they tracked, attacking corporate and government computers. They are put on a Black listed data base and they will never get a job in a major corporation in their life time.      
Here are three articles about Cyber Crime:
The online mafia 
Cyber gangsters are using computer networks to blackmail businesses - and they could be making you an unwitting accomplice 

From the Streets to Cyberspace: U.S. Gangs Turn to White-Collar Crime

When is credit-card theft a good thing? When the culprits might otherwise be killing you.
Cyber Crime—A Growing Problem in our Society

No comments: