Internet crime 'is big business'
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Internet crime is becoming a major commercial activity, a report by security firm Symantec says.
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More than 150 individuals have been arrested or convicted in a US-wide crackdown on internet fraud and abuse, according to an announcement from Attorney General John Ashcroft on Thursday.
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CEO weighs in on Linux, EU regulators, music pirates and "bad people out there in cyberspace."
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The numbers of malicious programs circulating online is reaching 'epidemic' levels, say experts.
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Home computer users are now the favourite targets of hi-tech criminals, reveals research.
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United Kingdom-based Web Sheriff opts for a more 'tempered' approach than does its rival to fighting online piracy.
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DOJ announces arrests, convictions for online fraud and other Net-related crimes.
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Secure shopping websites have made it much more attractive for consumers to spend billions of pounds on the web.   But many shoppers are ignoring basic internet security procedures, opening themselves up to online fraud.
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Also: Tightening the Net on cybercrime. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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The FBI is adding more Internet crime suspects to its top lists of wanted criminals, signaling a growing interest in cracking down on cyber-crime. -washingtonpost.com
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US Attorney General John Ashcroft heralded the success of Operation Web Snare, a multi-agency crackdown on cybercrime that led to the arrrest or conviction of more than 150 people for a variety
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As the world shrinks, international cybercrime is growing in scope and sophistication.
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A cybercrime is committed every 10 seconds in Britain, criminals abusing the anonymity of the online world to carry out offences from unwanted sexual approaches to online fraud, according to a study published Thursday.
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Federal law enforcement may be heralding Operation Web Snare as the largest cyber-crime crackdown of its kind, but it is receiving mixed reviews on whether it will stymie the rise in Internet fraud.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. Internet users should expect a growing number of prosecutions for sending spam and related activities, such as creating botnets, officials with two U.S. law enforcement organizations said Thursday. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has 70 active investigations into spam-related crimes, said FBI special agent J. Keith Mularski, speaking at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's spam summit. The FBI has worked with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), a partnership between law enforcement agencies, universities, and private businesses, to identity spammers, he said. The NCFTA, launched in 2002, has identified more than 100 "significant spammers," including five tied to traditional organized crime, Mularski said. Partnerships with industry are important to fight cybercrime, Mularski said. The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a joint operation of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, gets more than 22,000 complaints about cybercrime each month, up from 18,000 complaints a month last year, he said. "If we don't address it together, it's only going to get worse," he said. "Industry has all the information, because these guys are hitting their networks." The U.S. Department of Justice is targeting several spam-related activities, added Mona Sedky Spivack, a trial attorney in the DOJ Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. In June, theÂ DOJ and FBI launchedÂ Operation Bot Roast, targeting criminals who use networks of compromised computers, often called botnets, to send spam and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks. In addition to targeting "bot herders," criminals who control botnets, the DOJ will begin targeting "bot brokers," the people who negotiate the sale of botnet resources, she said. "We're going to start pegging them with some criminal liability," she said. "There is a lot of money getting exchanged here." Botnets and anonymous proxies are popular with spammers right now because they don't have to use their own computer resources to send the e-mail messages, Spivack said. This makes it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to track down spammers. The DOJ and other federal agencies are also targeting stock-scheme spam campaigns, she said. In a typical "pump and dump" stock scheme, spammers buy cheap stocks, then send out huge volumes of spam telling recipients that the stock price is poised to rise. The stock price goes up because of the spam campaign, and the spammers sell their stock at a large profit. On Tuesday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionÂ filed securities fraud chargesÂ against two Texas men for an alleged pump and dump scheme. The scheme allegedly cost investors $4.6 million. Despite news reports of such schemes, they tend to work, Spivack said. "It appeals to unsophisticated investors who are day traders at home," she said. The U.S. Congress passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act in 2003, and there's still debate over whether the law has reduced the amount of spam U.S. Internet users receive. CAN-SPAM allows senders to deliver unsolicited commercial e-mail, but requires that they stop when a recipient asks them to. CAN-SPAM also requires that commercial e-mail have accurate header information, have a legitimate postal address for the sender and have a working opt-out mechanism. The law has given some spammers a set of rules they must follow to become legitimate marketers, said Aaron Kornblum, a senior attorney with Microsoft. But law breakers have become inventive as law enforcement and private companies find new ways to combat spam, he added. Some spammers rotate the URLs (uniform resource locators) in their spam, making it difficult to track, others don't include URLs at all, he said. Some used pixelated text to defeat spam filters. "We need our investigative techniques to evolve," he said.
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Online theft of financial information from individuals has become one of the fastest-growing non-violent crimes in the Asia-Pacific region, technology research house IDC says.
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In the calculus of Internet crime, two of the most sought-after commodities are zombie PCs and valid e-mail addresses.