The latest research figures from the UK law enforcement agency charged with tackling cybercriminals — a motley mixture of lone hackers, organised criminal gangs and disgruntled employees — makes for pretty grim reading.
Launched on Tuesday at the NHTCU's annual e-Crime Congress, the survey claims the minimum combined cost of high-tech crime on UK companies with more than 1000 employees is around £2.45bn. Of the 200 companies surveyed, 89 percent said they had experienced some form of high-tech crime such as unauthorised access to internal systems or even theft of data.
According to the deputy-head of the NHTCU, detective superintendent Mick Deats, levels of online crime and hacking have increased substantially since last year's survey.
"All indicators show an increase," he says. "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."
Botnets consists of thousands of compromised computers networked together, typically for malicious use. The combined processing power of these hijacked PC networks can then be harnessed — the 'herding' process — and used to send huge quantities of spam or carry out denial-of-service attacks, explains Deats.
The NHTCU is now working to track down professional gangs who hire technical experts to build botnets to help carry out extortion, identity theft and spam assaults.
The force is also investigating the trade in paedophilic images on the Internet. Last year, the main focus of the unit was on individual cases of paedophilia, but increasingly the NHTCU is finding that the people who conduct other types of cybercrime have also latched onto selling child pornography as lucrative money-making scheme.
"The majority of material is sold by organised crime groups. There's clear evidence that paedophile material is sold by organised crime groups and phishing people," says Deats.
The NHTCU was set up in October 2001 and has conducted more than 70 investigations and arrested around 170 people since it began its operations. As a multi-agency unit, the group has seconded staff from the military, the intelligence agencies and Customs and Excise.
"The quality of the investigations and the fact that [officers] find themselves deployed all over the world is incredible," explains Deats. "I doubt whether when they joined the force ever thought they'd get into the situations they get into. You might find your self in a Ukrainian back water, in central Russia carrying out an arrest, going on raids with the locals, or going into prisons there. It's an incredible experience for them and that helps to retain staff."
