Cybercrime

For commercial websites that trade across the internet, criminal hacking and cybercrime can be catastrophic. A relatively basic denial of service attack can be the equivalent of having all of a trader’s their real-life stores closed down in one go. This means that all employees of a company should be aware of the possibility of cybercrime, not just the CEO or Security officer, and should address it in systems design, call the attention of appropriate authorities to it if they meet it, and so on. This implies the existence of appropriate policies. procedures and awareness training.

Denial of service attacks can range in their level of sophistication from destruction of physical internet connection points through to the flooding of websites with extraneous data that overwhelms web servers, forcing them to close down. These attacks can be coordinated using hijacked networks of computers, called botnets, which, in turn, are forced to send high levels of spurious data to target websites. There are steps that designers can take to mitigate such attacks but, in reality, a significant attack can be difficult to manage, and often the best course of action is to take down the servers and hope the attackers go away.

As well as financial attacks the theft of intellectual property is rampant and provides a real and present threat to corporate and nation state competitive advantage. Whilst the major enterprises have the resources to address this the SME community (i.e. 75 – 750 employee) is hugely at risk and needs support and education. For example, from recent Bloor publications, us brands targeted in online attacks ; glengarry glen ross – old fashioned inside threat; the rsa cybercrime trends report 2012; and, intellectual property theft: Protecting Data Against Cyber Criminals.

Malware continues to grow, including the evolution of more sinister variants such as Stuxnet, which hit the media headlines when reports emerged of that malware finding its way into Iranian nuclear plants. In 2012, HP Research estimated that cybercrime costs had risen by nearly 40 Percent, and that attack frequencies had doubled in the previous year. This means that systems should be designed from the ground up to be secure and manage the malware threat, as far as is possible.

Cybercrime is set to grow over the coming years. It is only by ensuring users and organisations understand the threats through education and are equipped with technical preventative measures that this threat can be reduced. This issue can only increase in importance as more criminals realise the benefits of committing offences on-line. Education (of users) is an important part of any vendor’s message but awareness needs to be balanced against business risk.

Cybercrime targeting smartphones is set to increase as criminals realise that these devices have a direct link to a user’s bank account. The rise in malware including trojanised applications reflects this. The perfect storm of social media, smartphone adoption and malware will continue to cause issues into the future; see “The BBC Interviews Nigel Stanley on Phone Hacking” here.