If your idea of cybercrime is a young hacker cracking down some secret services' website for the fun of it or just to show his outstanding ability, then you should reboot and get a closer look to reality. The rapid development of technology is leading to new ways of committing crimes, and to completely new crimes committed by highly organised groups of criminals.
Cyber-criminals today are motivated more by a desire to gain financially than to create havoc. Instead of releasing malware as a form of electronic vandalism, they design malicious codes to quietly use infected machines to accomplish their objectives, such as sending spam, diverting money from bank accounts, stealing credit card numbers, displaying advertisements, or providing a backdoor into the organization's network.
In fact, as we speak, your computer at office or at home could be illegally used to perpetrate serious crimes without you even noticing. Your PC could be used, together with hundreds of thousands other PCs, to crash down your own bank security systems and to divert money from your account or to steal sensitive information like your credit card number.
Large corporations are snapping up smaller companies that specialize in cybersecurity. This is a fragmented market with smaller niche players whose services range from thwarting threats to computer networks to posing them in order to help defenders spot vulnerabilities. The confidential nature of the work as well as the rapidly morphing nature of the threat makes for big business opportunities. A key challenge is that any defense against cyber threats must be constantly updated. A given defense could have a shelf life of as little as three months!
Cybersecurity is a growing concern. In 2010, the Pentagon tapped Army General Keith Alexander as the first commander of U.S. Cyber Command, created to better defend the Pentagon's 15,000 computer networks that link more than ten million machines. It centralizes command of U.S. military cyberspace operations, pulls together existing resources and seeks synergies that did not previously exist.
Basil Venitis, twitter.com/Venitis, points out the Ministry of Truth or Minitrue in Newspeak was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by government to control information in his seminal novel of 1984. Now, governments have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual monopoly on information that the public is able to access. But there is no way Minitrue can gag the internet. Even mainstream media, Fourth Estate, have praised bloggers as the Fifth Estate. Clergy is the First Estate, nobility is the Second Estate, and commoners is the Third Estate.
Starting with no money, no backers, and no affiliation with elite institutions, the internet made it possible for hoi polloi to succeed by making knowledge accessible and searchable on a scale never previously available. The intellectual playing field was being leveled and the internet changed the way we think about the very real possibility of fairness and opportunity in a world that has for too long been rigged to favor the elite.
Venitis asserts that all of the arguments for controlling internet are essentially themselves fraudulent and are in reality being exploited by those who favor big government and state control. The anonymity and low cost nature of the internet means that it can be used to express views that are unpopular or unconventional, which is its strength. It is sometimes used for criminal behavior because it is a mechanism, not because there is something intrinsic in it that makes it a choice of wrongdoers.
Before internet existed, fraud was carried out through the postal service and over the telephone. Pornography circulated freely by other means. As for the security argument, the tiny number of actual terrorists who use the internet do so because it is there and it is accessible. If it did not exist, they would find other ways to communicate, just as they did in pre-internet days. In fact, intelligence sources report that internet use by terrorists is rare because of persistent government monitoring of the websites.
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