|
|
ONLINE FEATURES
Book Reviews
BW Video
Columnists
Interactive Gallery
Newsletters
Past Covers
Philanthropy
Podcasts
Special Reports
BLOGS
Auto Beat
Bangalore Tigers
Blogspotting
Brand New Day
Byte of the Apple
Economics Unbound
Eye on Asia
Fine On Media
Green Biz
Hot Property
Investing Insights
Management IQ
NEXT: Innovation
NussbaumOnDesign
Tech Beat
Working Parents
TECHNOLOGY
J.D. Power Ratings
Product Reviews
Tech Stats
Wildstrom: Tech Maven
AUTOS
Home Page
Auto Reviews
Classic Cars
Car Care & Safety
Hybrids
INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | |
DECEMBER 2, 2003
By Alex Salkever A Key Weapon to Thwart Cybercrime Highly publicized FBI busts are nice. What consumers really need, though, is timely information they can use to protect themselves On Nov. 20 the FBI announced a massive Internet crime bust. Dubbed Operation Cyber Sweep, the investigation netted 125 arrests and indictments over the course of seven weeks. The FBI says those arrested, indicted, and convicted are responsible for $100 million worth of crimes affecting 125,000 Americans and dozens of businesses. The busted ranged from crackpots to the purely craven, including a disgruntled baseball fan who allegedly hacked into the computers of the Philadelphia Phillies and a credit-card scamster charged with using bogus card numbers and bad checks to beat online electronics store Outpost.com out of $80,000 worth of merchandise. In Operation Cyber Sweep, which is still ongoing, the FBI coordinated actions with dozens of law-enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level. Top FBI officials emphasized that the operation shows how high a priority cybercrime is for bureau investigators, and clearly, the busts bumped the battle up several notches. "Online criminals assume that they can conduct their schemes with impunity," said Attorney General John Ashcroft at a Nov. 20 press conference. "Operation Cyber Sweep is proving them wrong, by piercing the criminals' cloak of anonymity and prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law." FOLLOWING THE DOUGH. The FBI and its cohorts are to be lauded for the inroads they seem to be making in attacking cybercrime. But let's keep this in perspective. The folks who've been nabbed are mainly small-time confidence artists or at the most mid-level scamsters. The busted are the ones who could barely cover their tracks. And they resided in the U.S. -- easy pickings as compared to, say, Indonesia, where the FBI would find it slightly more difficult to collar international cyberthieves. Criminals rob banks because that's where the money is. Likewise, in cyberspace expect the most ingenious criminals to follow the dough. That hardly means penny-ante operations that pick off a handful of credit-card and bank-account numbers. Rather, the big money is in the big databases. Credit-card companies, banks, and credit-reporting agencies all store most of the files they keep on hundreds of millions of people in these big data warehouses, which are far more heavily guarded than someone's password at an e-commerce site. Major corporations understand that these big databases are an enormous liability and deserve serious security firepower. DANGEROUS MIGRATION. Inevitably, however, more and more of these supersensitive storehouses will suffer breaches. That's simply the law of large numbers as more and more people come online with broadband connections and more evil brains begin to comprehend the motherlode these data centers hold. A skilled malicious hacker could leverage a breach with other software to harvest personal IDs and export them en masse to any location around the globe. With that info they could apply for a million credit cards in a day or drain $5 out of millions of bank accounts -- enough to get rich but not enough to raise an immediate alarm. And a number of these big guys have already been hacked or suffered serious breaches ranging from unauthorized use of external access to their databases to suspicious break-ins that likely released hundreds of thousands of sensitive files into the cyber underground. Rarely are these databases connected directly to the public Internet, but then again supposedly neither were the ATM machines that failed under the barrage of bogus traffic when the Slammer worm struck in the summer of 2003. What's more, many of these databases are rapidly moving offshore and, therefore, outside the easy reach of U.S. law enforcement. Two of the three big credit-reporting agencies say they intend to move significant portions of their operations overseas, according to a Nov. 7 article in the San Francisco Chronicle by investigative reporter David Lazarus. Many banks and credit-card companies did this a long time ago, meaning that Ma and Pa Kettle's credit report is as likely to be retrieved from Bombay as from Boston.
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now! | | |
 Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Policy |
Printer-Friendly Version
