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Africa's Coming Cyber-Crime Epidemic
jfruh writes "Those Nigerian spam scams of the last decade may have just been the first step in a looming African cyber-crime wave. Africa has the world's fastest-growing middle class, whose members are increasingly tech-savvy and Internet connected — and the combination of ambitious, educated people, a ceiling on advancement due to corruption and lack of infrastructure, and lax law enforcement is a perfect petri dish for increased cybercrime."
"There's a great chapter from a 1981 children's book called "World of Tomorrow: School, Work and Play" that imagines how computers, in the future, would give rise to a whole new phenomenon: 'Computer Crimes" .. Computer criminals will "work from home, using his own computer to gain access to the memories of the computers used by the banks and companies"
...
I guess it'll be safer to use the BBC Microcomputer in the 'future'
AccountKiller
I can't remember which book it was, I think a William Gibson novel one of the characters made a lot of money exploiting old security exploits on old equipment that the African nations purchased collapsing their economies.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Africa is a huge continent. The US gets flooded with pictures of kids starving on a constant basis, but in reality, there are a lot of countries with a middle class, with middle class problems.
What I wonder about is the concept of small, but agile ISPs, small enough to provide security on their end (firewalls, outgoing port 25 blocking unless it goes through a relay, even perhaps more active IDS/IPS items like blocking C&C hosts.) ISPs small enough that they can handle threats rapidly, but large enough to be fairly profitable.
Defense in depth is critical, but there are places where one gets more bang for their naira on the network topology, mainly the edge routers, as well as different user segments.
Just offering an "antivirus kit" won't help much, because of the difficulty of AV programs in catching zero-days. Ideally an IDS/IPS, with some way to allow subscribers to bypass it if they have some special requirement (like a personal mail server, or running some other incoming process) would help catch the larger attacks, and help protect against DoS/DDoS attacks which won't take down the ISP, but can take down a subscriber on DSL or cable.
Nothing is perfect, but this is better than nothing.
The highest growth rates in internet access, during the past 10 years, have been in nations earning about $3000 per year, or 1/10 the average GDP of "rich" nations. As more and more people get internet, we can expect the use of "cybercrime" to expand, just as we can expect car accidents to increase in nations where cars become affordable. Meanwhile, loans to Africans through organizations like Kiva.org are repaid at a higher rate than bank loans in America. I do a lot of business in the developing (or more aptly named, Emerging) world and find the "petri dish for increased cybercrime" alarmist. The rapid, rapid education and rise of geeks of color is a "petri dish" for film, art, photography, software development (see MEST in Ghana), blood banks, laughter, tears, hugs, etc. Yes, cyber crime will increase, like everything else will increase. The article is stupid.
By the way, in case you missed it, the stories about "80-90% of e-waste exports" being burned by primitive African children has also been disproven by 3 separate studies. Africa has had television since I lived there in the 1980s, and the junk filmed burned at African landfills was in use for years, it's the same generation of waste as goes to our own landfills. Three studies showed that 80-90% of used computers imported are successfully reused and repaired. Articles like this one lead to profiling and arrests of good people as "e-waste criminals". The "other-ization" of geeks of color is really shameful.
Gently reply
COUNT ZERO
> Africa has the world's fastest-growing middle class
Translation for people who didn't major in math: Africa has almost no middle class.
When something is really really small, even the tiniest amount of growth appears quite large when expressed as a percentage. It's like when I say that the game my friends and I invented is the fastest-growing game in the world, because two nights ago there were only two of us playing it, but last night we had a party and played it with eight of our friends, so it experienced 400% growth in a single night, which if we extrapolate it out (assuming we maintain the same growth rate) would be hundreds of thousands of percent growth per annum.
Now, Africa's middle class isn't quite _that_ small. In fact, I believe there are more than eight people in the middle class in Nigeria alone. Nonetheless, Africa's middle class is excruciatingly small compared to the middle class on any other inhabited continent you care to name.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Why is Africa always having epidemics?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
So why the hell do we not cut them off from the Internet?
Here's why, by analogy:
Statement: The vast majority of violent crime occurs in urban areas.
Response by your logic: Why don't we carpetbomb all urban areas to prevent violent crime?
See what you did there?
Generalization is the hallmark of the non-thinker.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
One Laptop Per Criminal?
If we weren't at least a handful of generations beyond that point I'd agree. There comes a time when the past is the past and people need to look toward the future.
A discussion somewhere on http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians someone said ever since Europeans drew border lines in Africa and the Middle East, there's been nothing but problems since. An oversimplified answer but generated lively discussion. Of course what I'd like to know is percentage of e-criminals of population compared to other countries. And........ a serious crime is Wall Street types bilking many of their life savings.
mfwright@batnet.com