Why 2012 will be cybercrime's 'hell year'
Neal Ungerleider, FastCompany.com
A masked hacker, part of the Anonymous group, hacks the French presidential Elysee Palace
website in this Jan. 20 file photo near the eastern city of Lyon.
For online security professionals, 2012 is turning out to be a banner year. Prominent hacks are taking place nearly every week. Credit card fraud and piracy on the Internet are booming. Hacktivist attacks against government computers and private companies are occurring almost daily. Big-name government agencies and businesses everywhere are shelling out for security assistance ... but for everyday Internet users, it's a giant headache with unclear risks.
The one thing no one is really able to explain is why cybercrime's booming. According to a recent Norton study, cybercrime cost the global economy (in both direct damage and lost productivity time) $388 billion in 2011 — significantly more than the global black market for marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have reported exponentially increasing demand for cybercrime assistance—something confirmed by this reporter in anecdotal discussions with online security experts.
Every single expert has a different theory. Some say it's due to a global economy that's putting programmers out of work and turning them rogue. Others say it's the easy availability of computers in poor regions of the world where job prospects are few. Then others say it's simply that scripts and DDoS attacks have democratized cybercrime.
DDoS attacks — and their first cousins, botnets — are one of the biggest culprits. Most DDoS attacks are amazingly simplistic; they are denial-of-service attacks frequently made via software that requires no programming or IT knowledge. Botnets are impromptu networks of Internet-connected computers turned rogue via malware. Once a computer is compromised, they can be used for everything from financial fraud to knocking websites offline. Reached by email, Carl Herberger ofthe security firm Radware put much of the blame on hacktivists such as Anonymous.
"The motive for attacks has changed and this new motive brought with it new tools and attack techniques," Herberger tells Fast Company. "These new motives — frequently called 'Hacktivism' — are in a new category which will go down in the record books as one of the most active periods of cyberattacks in the history of information security. Given the current efficacy of ideologically based multi-vulnerability attacks such as WikiLeaks revenge attacks of 2010 and the Sony attacks of 2011, we believe this will only serve to encourage even more actors to enter the picture and spawn a vicious cycle of future malicious activity.”
Full story: http://www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com/technology/technolog/why-2012-will-be-cybercrimes-hell-year-196836
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