Will the rapid rise of cyber-crime continue in 2007?

Jan 2, 2007 3:48 PM

           

Computer security experts say 2006 saw an unprecedented spike in junk e-mail and sophisticated online attacks from increasingly organized cyber crooks. Few of them believe 2007 will be any brighter for the millions of fraud-weary consumers already struggling to stay abreast of new computer security threats and avoiding clever scams when banking, shopping or just surfing online, according to a Washington Post report.

One of the best measures of the rise in cyber-crime this year is spam. More than 90 percent of all e-mail sent online in October was unsolicited junk mail messages, according to Postini, a San Carlos, Calif.-based e-mail security firm. The volume of spam shot up 60 percent in the past two months alone as spammers began embedding their messages in images to evade junk e-mail filters that search for particular words and phrases.

As a result, network administrators are not only having to deal with considerably more junk mail, but the image-laden messages also require roughly three times more storage space and Internet bandwidth for companies to process than text-based e-mail, Daniel Druker, Postini's vice president of marketing, tells the newspaper.

Spam volumes are often viewed as a barometer for the relative security of the Internet community at large, in part because most spam is relayed via "bots," a term used to describe home computers that online criminals have compromised surreptitiously with a computer virus or worm. The more compromised computers that the bad guys control and link together in networks, or "botnets," the greater volume of spam they can blast onto the Internet.

"Botnets have become the moving force behind organized crime online, with a low-risk, high-profit calculation," Gadi Evron, a botnet expert who managed Internet security for the Israeli government before joining Beyond Security, an Israeli firm that consults with companies on security, tells the Washington Post. He estimates that organized criminals would earn about $2 billion this year through phishing scams.

Another interesting measure of the growth of online crime is data showing that criminal groups have shifted their activities from nights and weekends to weekday attacks, suggesting that online crime is evolving into a full-time profession for many.

Cuptertino, Calif.-based Internet security provider Symantec Corp. found that the incidence of phishing scams dropped significantly on Sundays and Mondays in the United States. "The bulk of the fraud attacks we're seeing now are coming in Monday through Friday, in the 9-5 U.S.-workday timeframe," Vincent Weafer, director of security response at Symantec, tells the newspaper. "We now have groups of attackers who are motivated by profit and willing to spend the time and effort to learn how to conduct these attacks on a regular basis. For a great many online criminals these days, this is their day job: They're working full time now."

2006 brought a steep increase in the number of software security vulnerabilities discovered by researchers and actively exploited by criminals. The world's largest software maker, Microsoft Corp., this year issued software updates to fix 97 security holes that the company assigned its most dire "critical" label, meaning hackers could use them to break into vulnerable machines without any action on the part of the user. In contrast, Microsoft shipped just 37 critical updates in 2005.

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