Online Crime Seen as Growing Threat to Business, Politics

BobB passed us a link to a NetworkWorld article, exploring the ongoing realization in business circles of the dangers online criminals pose. The piece raises the possibility that criminal elements are gaining access to US research labs in an effort to ferret out corporate and governmental information. One institute referred to in the article states: "Economic espionage will be increasingly common as nation-states use cyber theft of data to gain economic advantage in multinational deals. The attack of choice involves targeted spear phishing with attachments, using well-researched social engineering methods to make the victim believe that an attachment comes from a trusted source." We just recently discussed possible hacker involvement in several municipal blackouts.

Comments

Re:Good grief.

[Walt Dismal]

Indeed good grief. I saw an article some time ago noting that some Southern California gangs were infiltrating girlfriends into various financial processing institutions to steal credit card information, banking info, and so on. Even into the DMV. So there's certainly low-level activity. At one company I worked at, a crook got a job in the accounting department and somehow stole all the HR data, and some of that was used to get credit cards. How long before serious organized crime runs multiple active efforts for this? And how many Web commerce sites do criminal background checks on IT personnel?

Do You See The Common Thread Here?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

This is just like CIA Claims Cyber Attackers Blacked Out Cities Do you see the common thread here? Same SANS "expert", too. The guy who gave CIA props for their "disclosure". I remember when SANS was a good, technical security training and education outfit. Now they are on the Richard Clarke / Howard Schmidt CyberTerror disinformation campaign. I would doubt the spook "creds" - if you'd call 'em that - of Alan Paller. The worst theft and correlation of personal data is an ongoing effort by the state - with the telcos CA-CHING! Billing all the while. The crooks and Terra-ists are a joke in comparison. T'rists didn't "lose" several BILLION US dollars in small, unmarked bills in Iraq.

Who loses track of that kind of money? No one. Mistakes aren't made like that. Plans are. But we're supposed to be afraid of teh Internet now. Why? Cos' if we didn't have the 'net, we wouldn't know about that missing cash - or the validity of Operations MOCKINGBIRD, MKUltra, Northwoods, etc.

AirTran? This is a great outfit!