US Officials Finally Going After Online Organized Criminals In Other Countries

from the it's-a-start dept

It's no secret that Eastern Europe has become the center of an awful lot of organized crime online. Various phishing and scam rings tend to work from a variety of different Eastern European countries without much fear of law enforcement or prosecution. Most of the enforcement in the US to date has been on the few unfortunate Americans who got involved in such scams -- but such targets were almost always small-time scammers compared to the big players across the ocean. However, there are some signs that's starting to change. Forbes details the first case of a foreign cybercriminal being extradited to the US, noting that greater cooperation between foreign governments and the US means that we should be seeing more of this. However, the article also notes that this is only one small attempt, and officials haven't really been able to do any damage to some of the bigger organized crime groups online. Still, given how little the US gov't had been able to do to actually go after the real criminals, it is a good sign that at least they're looking for ways to reach across boundaries to find them.

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Apparently, Cybercrime Isn't Actually A Trillion-Dollar Business

from the maybe-it-needs-a-bailout-too dept

While online scams and cybercrime are growing, the claim made recently that cybercrime is a trillion-dollar business simply isn't true, says The Register. As Gary Stiennon points out, if it were, it would be bigger than global IT business itself, as well as the GDP of several industrialized nations. AT&T's chief security officer threw out the figure in front of a Senate committee; he also said that cybercrime was a bigger business than the global drug trade, another claim Stiennon disputes. He dug into where the myth was started, and how it's evolved, and traced it back to a single comment made by a consultant to the US Treasury Department in 2005. It's then been so commonly cited -- often by security companies looking to advance their own agendas -- and repeated that it's become widely accepted. Certainly cybercrime is a problem, and a growing one, but overstating its true impact won't make fighting it any easier.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Forget The Economy, Security Vendor Says Cybercrime Is The Real Threat

from the that's-not-my-job-man dept

You might have noticed that the economy is in the tank. Something about this "credit crunch" and "recession" and whatnot. But the amount of attention governments around the world are paying to these issues is giving cybercrime a foothold, according to a new study from a -- yep, you guessed it -- security vendor. This is the same vendor that's been saying the government needs to create new laws to combat cybercrime for at least a year. While their consistency is notable, their implication that the government is in the best position to fight cybercrime seems misguided. The best solutions remain technical and market-based in nature, while the usual mess governments make out of this sort of thing are hardly a ringing endorsement of their abilities to solve technological problems. All this makes you wonder if maybe the vendors see some way for themselves to gain from cybercrime legislation. Surely that's not right...

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Online Criminals Move On To Corporate Espionage

from the plain-old-phishing-doesn't-pay dept

One of these days, someone will do a fascinating study or book on the evolving nature of online crime. It's a constantly changing phenomenon that would be quite interesting to study. A few years ago, we noted that the ease with which script kiddies could jump into the phishing and online extortion market meant that margins were getting squeezed for older online organized crime groups who had focused on such practices in the past. Apparently, the big money now has moved away from standard phishing and into corporate espionage. Organized crime groups are figuring out ways to hack into company networks, suck up as much data as possible, and then sell it off to the highest bidder -- whether it's competing firms or foreign governments.

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