A Call to Cyber Safeguarding and Vigilance

Cyber crooks are increasingly operating like successful businesses, deploying the same tools legitimate companies use to boost their profits.

Networking giant Cisco said online criminals were increasingly using proven business practices.

“When your enemy is financially motivated you have to be on alert,” said Cisco fellow Patrick Peterson.

“Capitalism is a powerful force and these criminal types are collaborating with one another and sharing resources, renting out botnets and forming alliances.”

He pointed to the popular model known as “software as a service,” or SaaS, where a provider licences an application to a customer for use as a service on demand via the web saving costs for the user.

He said cyber-criminals were increasingly acting like virtual MBA (Master of Business Administration) students.

Mr Peterson also cited an increase in investment by the criminal community and its ability to offer off-the-shelf spyware and services like those dedicated to checking how well a piece of malware is performing.

This week’s arrests of three men in connection with one of the world’s largest computer-virus networks may seem like great news–perhaps even a sign authorities are starting to win the war against cyberthieves.

But the real situation is more complicated.

Internet crime is up, but arrests of “mastermind” hackers are rare. And the whole get-the-bad-guys effort, while it makes for good drama, is a futile way to secure the Internet, some computer security experts say.

“The virus writers and the Trojan horse writers, they’re still out there,” said Tom Karygiannis, a computer scientist and senior researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “So I don’t think they’ve deterred anyone by prosecuting these people.”

A Trojan horse is a seemingly innocuous piece of software that, once installed, gives malicious users access to a computer system.

It would be smarter, Karygiannis said, to develop new anti-virus technologies and to teach people how to protect themselves from Internet crime.

On Wednesday, Spanish authorities announced the arrests of three men in connection with a “botnet” network of nearly 13 million infected computers, which is believed to be one of the largest in the world. The infected network, called Mariposa, or “butterfly” in Spanish, was used to steal financial or personal information from people in at least 190 countries.

Botnets are networks of compromised, or “robot” computers controlled by a master for the purpose of stealing data or perpetrating other online crimes.

Some see the arrests as a sign that technologists and law enforcement officials are getting better at tracking large virus networks back to the people who author and propagate them.

Mustaque Ahamad, director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, which helped track down the arrested men, said preventing viruses from infecting computers was the old model for fighting this type of Internet crime. Today, going after the “bad guys” is the better long-term option, he said.