The Internet Crime Cafe

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Campus Security Focus

The Internet Crime Cafe

3/9/2007

By Doug Gale

It was the late 1980s, the era of VAXes and the NSFNET. Needing more disk space, one of our students hacked the account of a faculty member who was on sabbatical at another university. His exploits, which soon included computers from coast to coast, went unnoticed until the student forwarded an important but unread e-mail to the faculty member's sabbatical account. After explaining to the student the error of his ways and thanking him for his honesty in coming to the aid of our faculty member, we hired him.

In retrospect, perhaps our response should have been the same as the response to the plea, "Don't be afraid," in 1986 horror film, The Fly: "Be afraid. Be very afraid." Just as the lead character of the film, a brilliant but eccentric scientist, changed into something more malevolent than what he was before, so hacking has changed as well. While there are still lone hackers, motivated by the intellectual challenge, they have been largely supplanted by skilled teams whose objective is money, whose business model is organized crime, and whose scale is global. In the February 2006 issue of Business Week, Paul Horn estimated that 85 percent of malware today is created with profit in mind.

E-mail and malware
Another indicator of this trend to profit motivation is the malware content of e-mail. MessageLabs processes more than 180 million e-mails a day and makes the results of their scanning process available. (Check out Massage Labs' Threat Watch for real-time statistics of e-mail threats.) In the case of computer viruses, the last 12 months have seen the percentage of e-mail containing a virus fall from 1.65 percent to 0.28 percent. The percentage of e-mail that can be categorized as spam has remained fairly constant, between 50 percent and 60 percent. On the other hand, the percentage of phishing e-mail, whose objective is to steal something of monetary value, has doubled from 0.2 percent to 0.4 percent. And unfortunately, a recent Harvard study found that 90 percent of the phishing recipients don't recognize a well constructed phish.

According to United States Treasury advisor Valarie McNiven, "Last year [2004] was the first year that proceeds from cybercrime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs." Identity theft is on the rise. According to the FBI, "Identity theft costs American businesses and consumers a reported $50 billion a year, causes untold headaches for an estimated 10 million U.S. victims annually, and even makes it easier for terrorists and spies to launch attacks against our nation." The FBI