Cybercrime- alternative career choice?

While the global economy still reels from the effects of the recession, it seems that some unemployed IT specialists are turning in cybercrime.. Murali Podila investigates.

In the wake of the discovery that a 130m credit and debit cards have been stolen in USA, researchers at the University of Brighton have concluded that there has been a dramatic increase in cybercrime over the recent years. This is backed up by recent statistics from the Internet Security threat report 2008 that show a 468% increase in computer viruses between 2007 and 2008.

The report also highlights an alarming increase in India, China, Brazil and Russia. Brazil, Russia and China are considered to be world leaders in cybercrime, whilst there has been a sizeable 50 fold increase in cybercrime in India. This increase has been due to low salaries and high turnover in the IT industry in India and also an increase in call center cybercrime. This involves hacking into the banks and then taking out money.

There are many ways to commit cybercrime. A popular way is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack that targets a website or web server by sending more traffic to it than it can handle. An ‘upside’ of DoS attacks is that they don’t steal any private information, which is where malware comes in. Malware are things such as viruses, worms, Trojans. This usually involves an executable file being replicated on a network thus causing things like deletion of important files.

Of all methods of cybercrime, the most recent and profitable is by using things like spyware, botnets and keystroke loggers. There are many ways that spyware can be profitable, the main way being spam and popups ads. Another worrying method is to gather bank account information or passwords by using key loggers.

Although there has been an increase in virus detection and protection, human error is still one of the major reasons why there are so many cybercrimes occurring.

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Image credit: Martin Kingsley