2008 was a boom year for cyber criminals according to an article by BBC News.
If 2007 was witness to the rise of the professional hi-tech criminal, then 2008 was the year they got down to work.
Criminals are starting to change the way they attack computers. While fake emails used to be the way to infect the computers of unsuspecting victims, now attackers are uploading their malicious code to web sites. Just browsing a website that’s been tampered with can lead to an infected PC.
By the close of 2008, said Mr Cluley, Sophos was discovering a newly infected webpage roughly every 4 seconds.
In 2008 the criminals turned their attention to mainstream sites that had very large audiences and were vulnerable to the code-injection attack.
As noted in a previous post, many criminals are turning to “scareware” to make money.
Dan Hubbard from Websense said 2008 was also notable for some hi-tech criminals turning away from viruses completely and embraced another way to make money.
Many, he said, were turning out bogus security programs that look legitimate but do not work. Once installed they purport to carry out a detailed scan of a machine and always turn up many instances of spyware and other malicious programs.
Cleaning up a machine using one of the bogus security programs always involves a fee, said Mr Hubbard.
Because of the international nature of high tech crime, it’s going to take the cooperation of international police and coordinated government action to get this crime wave under control. It will also take a focus by software companies on developing secure, bug free code.
However, since we know that governments can’t seem to agree on much of anything, and writing secure code takes more time and reduces short-term revenue for software companies, I wouldn’t count on the situation getting much better in the forseeable future.
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