Internet threats shift toward financial gain

CALGARY —Internet hackers have shifted fundamentally away from nuisance and destructive attacks toward criminal activities motivated by financial gain, according to a new threat report from cyber-security firm Symantec.
Dean Turner, the Calgary-based director of Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network, said Internet hacking is now all about making money by stealing data.

“If you’re making noisy, nuisance attacks, you’re alerting people. And that’s not the goal. If you want to make money, you want to be quiet,” Turner said during the release of the semi-annual Internet security report.
And the attacks are increasingly being launched by malicious computer code hiding in trusted websites that people visit regularly through their web browsers.
“We’ve seen a real sophistication and a real commercialization of professional attack tools,” said Turner.
“Because the whole thing is so much about fraud and theft these days, it’s required that the bad guys actually have tools at their disposal that allow them to manage their vast networks of compromised machines,” he noted.
An example is MPack, which is a sophisticated “black-market attack toolkit” that tells users what country their infected computers are located in and the vulnerabilities it used to get in.
And with a known list of IP addresses, it’s able to hide from law enforcement or Internet security companies trying to track it, said Turner.
“These things are almost mimicking traditional software development—these guys have a go-to-market plan and they have support.
“This wasn’t a tool that somebody wrote that was co-opted for criminal purposes, this was designed specifically to be able to do this sort of thing,” he stressed.
Symantec regularly provides briefing for governments in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere on the ever-changing face of Internet threats.
The problem of Internet crime is well-known, but law enforcement agencies regularly admit they often are a few steps behind the cyber-criminals.
A report released last month on organized crime in Canada suggested online “data mining” was fuelling a growth in financial crime and identity theft.
And a group led by the Canadian Association of Police Boards is trying to build a Canadian-based international cyber-crime fighting centre in Canada to combat rising criminal activity on the Internet.
According to the Symantec report, more than 212,000 new malicious code threats were detected in the first half of 2007—a nearly 200 percent boost from the previous six months.
The report also said that Israel proved to have the most malicious activity per Internet user during the first half of the year, followed by Canada and the United States.
Credit cards were the most common commodity advertised on underground economy servers that Symantec found—accounting for 22 percent of all items.
Turner said the lure of the Internet for criminals is obvious. There are high levels of anonymity, a global reach, it’s difficult to track, and even more difficult to prosecute.
“So even if you could track somebody, if they’re in one jurisdiction and attacking somebody in another jurisdiction, how are you going to prosecute them? Where did the crime take place?
“There are some real fundamental questions that make this very attractive for the bad guys,” Turner noted.