CYBER WATCH
If you don’t know by now, there is big money to be made on the criminal side of computer usage these days, with the past two or three years producing a dramatic rise in for-profit computer attacks at every level, from the people running botnets and making money off spyware to widespread phishing attacks and various Trojans that encrypt a user’s data and request a ransom. To make matters worse, money laundering operations and organized crime are now involved in this new-age criminal activity because the dollars at play are simply enormous.
There is no doubt in my mind that money and computer viruses are be- coming quite synonymous, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past few years is that just about anything is avail- able for a price. For example, it is now possible to purchase a fully customized Trojan horse for phishing purposes, one that can inject new and nasty fields into a legitimate web page. Essentially, the average Joe Criminal can buy a toolkit that enables him to create a targeted, fully customized Trojan
horse capable of evading the detection of anti-virus software, and then use it to steal money from innocent people. What can these Trojans help steal? Money for starters. Phishing works be- cause most people can’t identify a fake web site. Let’s also consider another use for them. It’s easy to imagine a targeted Trojan running on a payroll manager’s computer inside a Fortune 500 company, logging keystrokes, taking screen shots, and responding to commands from someone on the other side of the world — or someone right next door.
Making matters worse is that hackers are teaming up with organized crime, thus pro- ducing nefarious possibilities that are end- less. As a result of these collaborative efforts, millions upon millions of dollars are being si- phoned from people’s accounts via sophis- ticated Trojan, phishing and botnet scams. These attacks can also target big popula- tions, which tend to skim a little bit of money off many people; they can also be pointed at a casino, poker, or porn web site to extort money from the owners by threatening to
issue a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack, which would take the company offline. Then there is phishing fraud, which has proven itself to be hugely profitable. In just a few years, phishing has become a household name for stealing banking details from hapless victims over the In- ternet. There’s a sucker born every minute, and they all use e-mail nowadays. With these few examples, it can be plainly seen as to how much money can be made through viruses, botnets and spyware. The days of the stereotypical geeky hacker writing up code in his basement are over. Today, it is Joe Average from next door who just bought the latest “attack kit” and is ready to unleash it onto his victims.
Brent MacLean is the founder and CEO of J.B. MacLean Consulting (
www.jbm.net) and Cana- dian Intelligence Solutions. He has more than 22 years
of experience in network, security, and in- frastructure design and troubleshooting.
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