cybercrime

The head of the British MI-5 counter-intelligence agency warned yesterday that state-sponsored efforts at cyberattacks had escalated into industrial-scale events involving thousands of people. Who is leading the charge? Superpowers like his government's closest ally.

Frustrated by the increasing frequency of criminal and state-sponsored cyberespionage attacks, some companies are moving toward 'active defense' policies that put them in the role of punisher rather than giving data to cops and letting them make the arrests.

The US and China are the most frequent victims of cybercrime, but also house the most frequent perpetrators as well. Yes, there's lots of cybercrime in Eastern Europe, and even a cybercrime-to-cybercrime market in Russia. But the story doesn't stop there.

Despite so much bragging about its success it sometimes failed to mention the role of security specialist Kaspersky Labs, Microsoft's successful takedown of the Kelihos botnet may need a version 2 or 3 or even 4 to be successful, because the first solution was just too weak to hold.

In a scene more credible inside the game, two gangs of thieves crashed out or blocked in delivery vans, disabled the drivers with tear gas and took off with $500K worth of the hottest unreleased video game of the year.

A document purportedly leaked form the FBI's criminal-profiling unit calls Anonymous not a collection of activists , but a unified criminal group focused on protest and social disruption.

Cybercrime, especially malware, is rising, but not evenly. More Chinese suffer than Japanese, men more than women, slackers more than A/V updaters, 'net addicts more than luddites.

The British teen accused of being LulzSeccer Topiary was released on bail amid protests from Anonymous, and a rash of hacks against police, none of which has slowed the arrests at all.

U.S. Marshals stopped 30 billion spams per day shutting down the Rustock botnet in March, but no one filled that niche, presumably because spam is now riskier than other crimes.

Here’s a tale of wonder from the land down under.

Botnet makers are shifting from front-line crime to software development, renting their product to anyone with money to pay and mayhem to make.