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Only 100 Cybercrime Brains Worldwide, Says Europol Boss
mrspoonsi writes There are only "around 100" cybercriminal kingpins behind global cybercrime, according to the head of Europol's Cybercrime Centre. Speaking to the BBC, Troels Oerting said that law enforcers needed to target the "rather limited group of good programmers". "We roughly know who they are. If we can take them out of the equation then the rest will fall down," he said. "This is not a static number, it will increase unfortunately," he said. "We can still cope but the criminals have more resources and they do not have obstacles. They are driven by greed and profit and they produce malware at a speed that we have difficulties catching up with." The biggest issue facing cybercrime fighters at the moment was the fact that it was borderless. "Criminals no longer come to our countries, they commit their crimes from a distance and because of this I cannot use the normal tools to catch them. "I have to work with countries I am not used to working with and that scares me a bit," he said The majority of the cybercrime "kingpins" were located in the Russian-speaking world, he said.
Perhaps 'only' 100 that you know about, but that statement is clearly insane. These attacks aren't just done by some long haired, Dorito fueled teenager with 16 screens and a hot girlfriend. Like everything else these days they're done by teams of people. Somebody good at Windows, somebody good at Cisco routers, someone skilled in social hacks, somebody with access to money.
I don't know why we even bother with these sorts of articles. They guy's credibility is about as good as the average politician.
"It is a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Troels Oerting said that law enforcers needed to target the "rather limited group of good programmers". "We roughly know who they are.
Oh, they're crafty I tell you, those little programming bastards!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Of course the top cyber criminals are from former soviet bloc countries. That's where the top spammers have resided for a long time as well, and there is a lot of overlap between the two sets. While in the US we don't have anti-spam laws that mean anything, in those countries the people tasked with enforcing the laws are openly accepting bribes from people who violate them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This is about like going after Al Queda's no 2 guy. There will always be more and really if you have problems with these guys the next set are going to throw you into fits.
Secret service, maybe, but not NSA
"We roughly know who they are. If we can take them out of the equation then the rest will fall down,"
The same rhetoric is encouraged by the military industrial complex to start wars that benefit their bottom line. This is no different.. "give me the resources and I'll finish it up" -- yeah, just like the War on Drugs, too, right? Nonsense. You can't attack something without the centralisation and infrastructure of stable nations or organisations, which is why things like "Bomb Isis!" fail so miserably. This dude is just making monkey statements to get funding for his department, to which even if he succeeded in taking down "the hundred kingpins", nothing would ultimately change as others would rise in 'their' place.
Between China, North Korean and the former Soviet countries there are THOUSANDS of programmers who can make sophisticated exploits and there are probably as many in the free world.
You're just another power-hungry twit looking to implement toll-roads to everywhere on the information superhighway.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The only way to protect you're selves from cybercrime is to not put you're assets in easily accessible places by 'cyber criminals'. Believing you can catch all the criminals to end crime is the worst fallacy I've encountered.
* crime is not caused by criminals, it's caused by situations that cause the majority of people to become criminals.
* Cybercrime is on the rise because the payouts are better then other forms of crime.
* People are getting smarter and so are criminals too
* Our internet infrastructure is woefully in-adequate for what we want to use it for. But no one is willing to go back to the older and more reliable way of doing this. Which also had their fair share of dirty issues (filecabnets raided in the middle of the night out of the white house anyone)
Needless to say if you don't want people to be criminals. Don't give them incentives to be criminals and try to reform people or bring them up so they feel like being a part of society rather then antisocial sociopaths.
Of course there's probably no way to eliminate sociopathy 100% from the human genome. But there is good reason for it right now. Eliminate that reason and we'll decrease it 100 fold.