The Life of a Cybercrime Investigator 79
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Santorelli gets computing experts and law enforcers to cooperate in a global fight against organized Internet crime. This article talks about the role of law enforcement in identifying and battling online threats as they change and evolve. Quoting: 'The common wisdom about hacking and cybercrime is, in Santorelli's view, severely out of date. He says cybercriminals aren’t lone wolves; they are financed and directed by international criminal syndicates. ... Organized crime also has vast resources derived from its traditional operations to finance the hiring of quality hackers around the world. There is even evidence that some syndicates are investing in research and development, looking to create proprietary, next-generation hacking tools, Santorelli says.'"
Not just criminal syndicates, governments too (Score:3, Interesting)
Much of the hacking now is government-sponsored too. China, Israel, the U.S., and Russia have all been allegedly involved in this for some time (probably a lot of others too). Stuxnet [wikipedia.org], theft of Google source code [wired.com], you name it. Seems like everyone is in the cybercrime (or cyberwarfare if you want to stick a more polite euphemism on it) business these days.
No. Government militarization dates back to 1990s (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally observed at least six or seven countries' military domains looking at one of my sites in the late 90s which focused on then unrealised methods of remote operating system fingerprinting (many of which were ICMP-based, and not implemented publicly until years later). As well as many parts of the US military, there was (South, obviously) Korea, Japan, and Germany I believe. Of course, back then they were happy to browse from a .mil.* IP, these days none of them would do that. Australia used to have a lot of network warfare information up on the DSTO website, there's less these days, however they are still a good source for the multi-military JWID events (Joint Warfare Interoperability Demonstrations), a regular compatibility-of-command-and-control event that involves many western militaries. The trend I have seen thus far is for government/military to co-opt hackers through establishing corporate fronts, usually led by an otherwise-reputable hacker who is on the take or convinced to 'help the country' with nationalism. They also pay hackers with basic community cred as informants, and send them to security-related events all around the world in the hopes of acquiring actionable intelligence. We all need to be very careful who we give information to. Furthermore, the increasingly commercial development of some areas of our industry (open source intelligence gathering / computational linguistics / passive traffic analysis + surveillance / video surveillance systems) are strongly contributing to the further degradation of society in to a 1984-like situation. The best thing we can do as people is to avoid the allure of money and refuse to work in these areas, whilst publicly pointing the ethical finger at those that do.
Some lone wolves still (Score:3, Interesting)
Although all of the powerful crackers know others, some of them truly are lone wolves. For instance, The Jester (th3j35t3r ) with his Xerxes botnet. He doesn't claim any affiliation AFAIK and is self-proclaimed former military hacker. I always wondered if they give him a pass because he helps with other things, like taking down Islamic-jihad websites which he's know to do. No man is an island after all and he definitely has connections. But still he seems to be the "lone wolf" acting with impunity at times.
And that's just one of many that have never claimed a group affiliation and seem to be driven more by underground fame and rage than money or crime.