Evolution and Future of Cybercrime
You can put the word ‘cyber’ on the front of just about anything and make it sound more “cool”, or “ominous” as the case may be. You don’t need to travel to Ethiopia when you can just visit CyberEthiopia. Instead of having sex, you can have cybersex. Why just commit a crime, when you can commit a cybercrime? No. Really. Why would you?
If you need to acquire $50,000 you would need to find a target with a fair net worth. You would probably need to be armed, risking the lives of others whether you have an intent to do harm or not. Your own life will be at risk. The obstacles to success, and the odds of failure are both high- most likely resulting in your incarceration or death. At least in jail or 6 feet under, you probably won’t need that $50,000 any more.
What if you could just sneak $1 out of the wallet of 50,000 different people? They probably won’t notice. If they discover the $1 missing, they probably won’t care, or may even assume they just lost it or mis-counted. If they catch you in the act, odds are good that they will be disgruntled, however it is highly unlikely that the theft of $1 could result in physical harm, never mind death. Hell, if you simply ask 50,000 people to give you $1, you may be successful. Look at the kid that created the $1 Million Web Page. A little corny and very hard to read, but people lined up to give the kid $1 (I’ll bet he’s kicking himself for not thinking to make it the $10 Million Web Page). It could take some time to find 50,000 victims though.
Now, what if you could sneak $1 from 50,000 different people while sitting at your laptop in the local coffee shop? What if you never have to physically confront a single person, nor risk physical harm in any way? What if you could perpetrate a virtual crime, cyberpickpocketing? It has the word ‘cyber’ at the front, so it must be cool! How about if your cyberpickpocketing could net $50,000 today? How about in the next hour or two? That definitely sounds like a more solid business plan than the “Pickpocketing Across America” approach cited above.
That is the allure of cybercrime. As Marcus Ranum, CSO of Tenable Network Security and author of The Myth of Homeland Security, discusses on Tenable’s blog, cybercrime provides a criminal with a means of automation and anonymity, requires very little in terms of information technology knowledge or equipment, and can cross global borders in a heartbeat, making it easier to hide and harder to be prosecuted. Ranum’s post is an excellent read. For many of the same reasons: automation, efficiency, lack of potential for physical harm, mass-impact, anonymity, and difficulty finding and prosecuting an attacker internationally- cyberterror will also gain appeal (at least to those likely to find ‘appeal’ in committing acts of terror in the first place) in my opinion. But, we’ll save that issue for a future post.
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Tony Bradley
www.tonybradley.com
Essential. Computer. Security.
