Do Professional Online Criminals Really Exist?On Thursday July 9th 2009, the Financial Times "Digital Business" section lead with a story about professional online criminals. The thrust of the article - by Alan Cane - was that cyber criminals are now organised and professional. To readers of this website this probably isn't 'news'. However, he was keen to point out that many online criminals now use agreed service standards. In other words, they are using the form of business to organise themselves. In researching his article he has found some malware applications that have a user interface and are designed to look very much like Windows to enable users an easy time. This isn't exactly how the general public thinks of hackers or their software... The difference says Cane, is that professional online criminals now have an 'ecostructure' and are no longer one person operators. They outsource different elements of a project and buy custom made software. In fact, there are e-commerce sites in operation that solely sell illegal software and technology. Other websites enable a healthy trade in stolen personal information - the lifeblood of identity theft. Not mentioned in the article, but still quite widely known, is that some websites that enable the trade in stolen personal infomation do so in very large quantities - often hundreds or thousands of people at a time! Online security isn't helped by the growing popularity of community, social networking or Web 2.0 sites. Users share more and more of a personal nature to the extent that some of their private data is simply given away. This would give any identity thief an easy start. To read more about identity thieves and identity theft, please follow the links below:
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