Cybercriminals are proliferating while governments are
distracted by therecession and thecredit crunch, according a report on
cybercrime released today.
The annual
McAfee
Virtual Criminology Report reported a tripling in the volume of
cyber attacks it monitors each year. "We are on an exponential
upwards curve," McAfee security analyst Greg Day told Computer
Weekly.
Day said cybercriminals are using all the existing attacks plus
new ones to steal information they can sell. He said the latest
scam was to pay "a couple of hundred dollars a month" to website
owners to host a few lines of Java code.
"That is attractive to a lot of people these days," Day said.
The trouble is that the code can download different types of
malware onto unsuspecting visitors to the website, he said.
Cybercrime is slipping down governments' agenda, the report
found. This means less funding to fight it, hence fewer cybercops
and therefore less risk to cybercriminals.
Day said the UK government's intention to
spend £7m on a specialist e-crime police unit needed to be seen
against the US's budgeted $155m for the same purpose.
Day called for more educationfrom the end-user to the judiciary
to alert people to the threat posed by cybercrime. He also called
for Council of Europe treaties aimed at fighting international
cybercriminals, particularly regarding data sharing and
jurisdiction, to be updated, ratified and implemented.
He said a data breach law was essential for ordinary people to
become aware when their details might be compromised. "At last
the Data Protection Act is getting teeth," he said. This was a
reference to the Information Commissioner's new powers to bring
criminal prosecutions for deliberate or negligent disclosure of
personal data.
The report found cybercriminals cashing in on consumer anxiety
about the credit crunch with old-fashioned get-rich-quick scams.
Others were setting up fake job sites to harvest CV data from
desperate job seekers. Some of them are recruited as "money mules"
to launder cybercriminal gains, Day said.