The new face of cybercrime
Everyone knows that we live in an age of greater security threats and strange new crimes. Still, the media tends to concentrate on very obvious and tired examples. While we’re not trying to make anyone paranoid, identity theft might be the least of your worries.
Some of the new face of cyber crime bears a distinct air of comedy. For example, a disgruntled car dealership employee who hacked car GPS systems to disable cars, a practice normally reserved for delinquent accounts. But most have a more sinister quality about them. Two researchers recently discovered a way to crack the PIN on Google Wallet. In fact, Google recently suspended prepaid credit card functions on Google Wallet due to privacy concerns.
Particularly with near field communication technology increasingly taking hold, it’s not hard to imagine hackers and identity thieves inventing a device that allows them to harvest user’s financial information without the user having any knowledge of it, until it’s far too late. Card skimmers are about to go wireless.
Technology consultant and author Anthony R. Howard is quick to point out that even identity theft is often linked to far more sinister crimes, such as extortion and kidnapping. For example, Howard told us, “not too long ago a cyber crime researcher flew from his home in the US to St. Petersburg to investigate mob activity in cyber crime. He returned home to find his teenage daughter kidnapped and a message indicating the rest of his family would be safe if he stopped investigation.”
“Think of things like gambling and huge e-commerce sites,” Howard told us in an exclusive interview, “Hackers can demand $100,000 to not shut the site down or get it back up after it’s been put down. It works because companies can’t afford to lose the revenue and no one wants to admit they’re being extorted.”
Further, the line between government entities and criminal gangs isn’t as clear as one might think. Russia and China’s cyber attacks make big news, but only a terribly naïve person would assume that the United States isn’t up to the same thing. Howard told us “Governments sanction certain cyber criminals. Hackers are permitted to engage in certain activities in exchange for being free-of-charge contractors for governments in need.”
But governments aren’t the only ones engaged in high profile cyber attacks. Nor do all cyber attacks have a high profile. James Hannon started our talk by going on about a far less high profile government abuse of cyber power: The well-documented case of the Philadelphia school system spying on its students using webcams. Apparently the potential for webcam hacking -- every webcam users nightmare -- is more widespread than one might 
think initially. While Hannon is quick to point out that people are open to cyber voyeurs, there are also far more sinister implications. “Think about the medical industry: A video conference about your medical records can be easily hijacked.” Other criminal opportunities include insider trading and corporate espionage. “A company can pay a rogue employee to install a spyware system that’s undetectable inside your system.” This takes corporate espionage to another level. Previously, documents could be stolen through hacking. Now the very discussions that lead to those documents aren’t even safe.
Still, Robin Martinelli of Martinelli Investigations provides a bit of a silver lining. At least in the case of low-level crime on the part of the unorganized, a large number of tracks get left. While it’s not always easy, Martinelli says people should file a police report, even if it doesn’t yield immediate results. In some cases “we have to subpoena Google and then subpoena the ISS and then find out who it is.” When you’re being pranked or harassed this is an option. However, large corporations and people going up against highly organized computer crime gangs have little recourse thus far. This is a case where the criminals are far more advanced than those chasing them and the line between the two isn’t as clear as one might think. We are very likely in the middle of a cyber crime arms race. Where it ends is anyone’s guess.
(A Defense Criminal Investigative Service special agent is pictured above as he investigates a cyber crime within the Department of Defense)