Cybercrime: countering the threat

By every authoritative measure cybercrime and the threat of becoming a victim to it is growing exponentially. In a keynote speech on 12 July the Metropolitan Police Commissioner graphically described both the scale of the threat and absence of an effective national strategy to address it. This is a problem for every legitimate IT user. It ranges from the parent whose teenage child is buying music downloads online which crashes the home PC, to the boss of the temporary employee removing data from the workplace, to the General whose former soldier hands data to Wikileaks, right up to the chief information security officer at Google whose state of the art defences were recently breached and sensitive data accessed by hackers from a hostile jurisdiction.

The modern criminal is adept at finding and exploiting weaknesses in modern communication systems and is increasingly targeting businesses rather than just using mass spam techniques. With access to ever cheaper and more sophisticated malicious software programmes, anti-virus protection barriers become less effective. The relative anonymity, speed and global reach of the medium makes it a potent tool in the wrong hands. If well-resourced sovereign states and multi-national giants struggle to maintain the integrity of their own systems then most users will have significant exposure, particularly during a period when budgets to maintain and upgrade security are under pressure.

Click here for our article which takes a look at the scope of the problem from an historical context and suggests a range of measures which will help stave off the cybercrime threat, both at work and at home.