Criminal Activities Expand on the Web

Criminals are crowding the World Wide Web to set up fake airline or banking websites. These exactly resemble the true sites, the process called 'pharming'. The criminals are also sending e-mails from apparently legitimate addresses requesting personal information something called 'phishing' all resulting in severe offences.

Experts are unanimously concerned about the increasing worldwide threat of cyber crime. According to Phil Hickey, the consumer product-marketing manager of Symantec, the number of incidents of cyber crime has climbed to 81% all over the world in the first half of 2007. In India, spam accounts for 76% of all e-mails, which exceeds the global average of 56%. The Telegraph published Hickey's statement on July 23, 2007.

In the past, cyber crimes related to fraud via e-mail that tricks victims into disclosing their banking details or performing financial transactions of dubious nature. Today, attackers are turning away from large-scale assaults on company firewalls to specific targets on individual desktop PCs. For this, they mostly use Web applications that can steal personal, financial and other confidential data to later use them for monetary gains.

Cyber crime is now the vital source of revenue for organized crime, said Katie Gotzen, industry analyst at Frost and Sullivan. As a result, the potential danger arising from malware has increased dramatically, Gotzen said. Echannel Line published Gotzen's statement on July 17, 2007.

Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report for April 2007 has also showed that the rates of Internet and computer-related crimes have been going up since few years. Cyber criminals are honing their sophistication to target businesses that is resulting in the growth of theft of sensitive, confidential data.

A point to note is the presence of protection devices against phishing in the recent versions of the three most popular Internet browsers - Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera.

Even after adopting various security measures, cyber criminals manage to escape the traps. Sometimes the perpetrators know how to destroy their tracks on cyber space, which makes it more difficult to catch them, said Ajoy Kumar, the deputy commissioner of the detective department. The Telegraph reported this on July 23, 2007.

Related article: Criminals Hack With More Evil Tactics

» SPAMfighter News - 8/6/2007