High internet access brings vulnerability
International trends show that the more broadband access a country has, the more criminals and hackers are able to exploit computing power and con or inconvenience the users.
The link is now affecting China, and will inevitably hit SA too, says Richard Archdeacon, a director of the computer security company Symantec.
High-speed, always-on internet access means computers are open for attack 24 hours a day. Yet in their eagerness to get that broadband access, companies forget to think about security until later, Archdeacon says.
Symantec’s latest study of cybercrime found that China saw a 37% growth in the number of computers infected with malicious code and drawn into a “botnet” — a large network of computers being controlled remotely.
China also won the dubious honour of a 153% rise in the number of attacks originating from that country.
Hackers who plant the robot code can harness that power to send spam or fraudulent e-mails trying to con users into revealing their personal banking details. Bot nets are also used to launch denial of service attacks that bombard a network with so much mail that it collapses, often as part of an extortion threat on the victim company.
One network that was recently detected was stealing the power of a staggering 450000 compromised computers.
The UK has also suffered an increase in online crime, again connected to the rise of broadband, says Archdeacon.
“We have seen this correlation between broadband and criminality in the UK and Korea and now in China. It doesn’t mean there are a lot of bad guys in China, it just means there are a lot of computers that can be attacked.”
Symantec’s study found that 22000 new computer bugs were written last year, up 50% from the previous year.
Past attacks were designed to destroy data or to cause widespread damage and win notoriety for the perpetrator.
Now most attacks are designed to steal data for profit without alerting the user. Of the 50 most common malicious codes, 80% are able to steal confidential information.
Hackers are taking a businesslike approach by specialising in targeting a certain type of industry or companies in a certain geographic area, Archdeacon says.
Others specialise in detecting software vulnerabilities that let them into a system, and they sell those details to the criminal fraternity. Running botnets has also become a commercial activity, and criminals can now hire the computing power to commit an attack.
Some hackers are so professional that they have a production department writing malicious code, a marketing department selling their products and an outsourcing department conducting attacks on behalf of other criminals.
Meanwhile, security company McAfee is monitoring a newly created bug in Russia designed to attack mobile phones.
The bug is still in the “proof of concept” stage, McAfee says, but it is serious because it is the first attack written for ordinary handsets, rather than more sophisticated but far less common smart phones.
The malicious code is contained in a web browser application for cellphones. Once users download and activate the application to surf the internet, it sends SMS messages to premium rate numbers. The messages incur a fee of R3 to R5 each.
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