[clug] July CLUG Programmers' Special Interest Group meeting (follow-up)

[steve jenkin]

Adam,

thanks for the response and link.

I wasn't arguing there was NO 'cybercrime' before 2003/4, just that
around the time there was an inflection-point in hacker/cracker
activity. The nature of the threat evolved in the usual exponential-way
of things Internet. After that time, the biggest source of
threats/attacks wasn't Script-kiddies bent on defacing etc...

Clifford Stoll in "Cuckoo's Egg" stumbled across a hacker attempting
espionage in Germany (East or West? can't recall).

These days industrial and political cyber-espionage seem to be growing,
as are high-targeted attacks (e.g. rolling-over superannuation accounts).


Adam Baxter wrote on 17/07/11 2:51 PM:
> CERT seems to back up these ideas, but with an earlier date.
> 
> "The first trend is that organized crime groups use the Internet for
> major fraud and
> theft activities.
> 
> Perhaps the most notable example of this – albeit an unsuccessful
> one – occurred in October 2000 and concerned the Bank of Sicily. A group of
> about 20 people, some of whom were connected to mafia families, working with an
> insider, created a digital clone of the Bank’s online component. It
> then planned to
> use this to divert about $400 million allocated by the European Union
> to regional
> projects in Sicily.
> 
> The money was to be laundered through various financial
> institutions, including the Vatican bank and banks in Switzerland and
> Portugal. The
> scheme was foiled when one member of the group informed the authorities.
> Nevertheless, it revealed very clearly that organized crime sees enormous
> opportunities for profit stemming from the growth of electronic banking and
> electronic commerce."
> 
> http://www.cert.org/archive/pdf/cybercrime-business.pdf
> 


-- 
Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin