Cyber Criminals Robbed South African Governments

According to an internal audit services by KwaZulu-Natal, a gang of cyber criminals in coordination with dishonest civil servants has defrauded four regional governments of over 199 Million Rand (US$ 25.08 Million) over the three years (2005-07) by using a malicious tools such as spyware.

Spyware is a program that helps in collecting information about an organization or individual without their consent. Scammers install the spyware onto the victim's computer to surreptitiously collect the user's information and forward it to third parties like advertisers. The malware usually enters the computer in the form of a computer virus or on account of installing new software.

According to Geoff Sweeney, CTO for Tier-3, a security company, it is hard to prevent spyware attacks as they have a rather unpredictable nature, and also because of the union of Trojans, viruses and other malicious programs, as reported by ChannelRegister on June 10, 2008.

According to the officials, the vicious scam continues to prevail in spite of the fact that arrest of 32 people and civil servants were dismissed during 2005-07. The provincial governments of KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape have all been victimized in the scam.

It is believed that the cyber criminals are taking benefits of dishonest government officials along with vendors to install a spyware kit onto computers to subsequently access all forms of information. It is also believed that the gang has targeted several banks across the country. Further, a long duration of time has passed to resolve the problem as officials were initially focusing on tracking the criminals; however, they are now concentrating on preventing these incidences from happening again.

According to Sweeney, the fraudsters seem to be employing a sophisticated blend of attacks comprising a malware piece and a physical device. This is evident from the way the criminals have been escaping to get noticed for nearly three years (2005-07).

Moreover, Internet crimes involving the provincial governments' affected computers have been constantly increasing in number. These have been infected by malicious software that exposed the vital and confidential data to the crooks. In 2006, there were reports of eight instances of spyware installation and in 2007 another 18 were investigated.

» SPAMfighter News - 26-06-2008

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