The UK's online police force, the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), has confirmed that the level of crime on the Internet is growing.
In an exclusive interview with ZDNet UK, deputy head of the unit Superintendent Mick Deats warned that the sudden uptake of insecure broadband was allowing criminals to control the computers of regular consumers.
"All indicators show an increase," said Deats on Thursday. "It's on the up. It's the uptake of broadband that hackers and the botnet herders [are exploiting]. Botnet technology continues to be the common denominator for the investigations we carry out."
A botnet consists of thousands of compromised computers networked, typically for malicious use. The combined processing power of a botnet can be harnessed — a process sometimes referred to as herding — and used to send huge quantities of spam or carry out denial-of-service attacks. .
The NHTCU will launch results of its annual survey on cybercrime next Tuesday. Deats wouldn't give any advance details of the survey, but he did say that Mafia-like organised crime gangs were becoming more involved with cybercrime.
"Their specialities range from writing malicious code to deploying botnets focusing on identity or banking details," he said. "All of these specialists are interacting with each other and all are taking a slice of the pie. And that's a difficult model to tackle."
Later this year, the unit will launch "Project Endurance", a UK-wide IT security-awareness campaign, and next year it will become part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
Talkback
It never ceases to amaze me how much things change yet stay the same...
To the first: technology in every facet of daily life is becoming the norm, it’s time to get used to it. Do your homework, all ye tech writers out there. After all, your job is to educate, rather than simply entertain, the people (and yourself). The simple fact is: ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, and, contrary to other claims, we are nature. Yet technology, and hence our future, has most of us stumped. We think Planck’s constant is the norm; we think we know so much. But it is for the most part generalized knowledge, and when it comes to the details, bombarded by technological snippets that really in toto give us the answers, Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle rules instead, in a matter that will ever more specifically affects our daily existence.
To the Second: Remember the lament at the foundation of 'Oliver Twist', by Charles Dickens? Period dress-ups aside, Dickens paints a picture of pervasive lawlessness, 'organized crime' units roaming the streets, preying on innocent citizens. Just as in the cyber-world today, there was no official police system to at least clean up crime in the streets. Police didn’t come into official existence until 1818, and that was in France. Robbery and thievery were running amok Pockets were picked then as well as now. And while it seems like such a lovable, quaint world looking back, accounts of the time were just as frustrated and apparently helpless as today’s.
But I have a more important and specific point than simply delivering a general, socio-cultural lecture and lament.
And it is this.
We really do have the ability to limit spam to a trifle. We really can put an end to bot activity, gradually, by making the enterprise unprofitable. We really do have the know-how to stop 'phishing' dead in its tracks, and clean the Internet streets of cyber-crime. We really do have the capability to even catch the people behind this. Just because most of us assume this problem cannot be solved any time soon, and needs the likes of "'Project Endurance', a UK-wide IT security-awareness campaign", does not mean that this effort is not truly unnecessary. We do not need to have further 'studies', at least as far as action today is concerned. Whether spam or bot or phish or pharm, all we need is to pay attention to the technology information scraps, and, above all, to the activity in the proverbial garages of California, that seedbed of innovation. And, Voilà! The answers are out there!
Here’s at least one: at www.ASTAV.net