2008 was a good year for cybercrime

very large audiences and were vulnerable to the code-injection attack.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, agrees that 2008 was the year in which some hi-tech criminals got much more sophisticated. The best example of this, he said, was the virus known as Mebroot. “We saw it very early in the year and it continues to be a very complicated case,” he said. One of its most remarkable features is its built-in bug reporting system, said Hypponen. When Mebroot is detected or malfunctions revealing its presence it sends off a report to its creators who then turn out a new version with the bug fixed. “It’s amazing that the bad guys were capable of pulling this off,” said Mr Hypponen.

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 Hubbard. “They are testing legal boundaries that are a gray area right now,” he said.

In mid-December 2008 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission won a restraining order to shut down several firms that ran so-called “scareware” scams. Research by Israeli security company Finjan suggests that up to five million people around the world have fallen victim to such scams (see 16 July 2008 HS Daily Wire). A U.S. court granted the FTC an injunction which stopped those behind the scareware products from making false claims about their efficacy and froze assets in the hope that duped customers could be refunded.

2008 also saw other big successes against criminals. In mid-November spam volumes around the world plummeted briefly following the closure of U.S. network firm McColo. Despite this, said Hypponen, 2008 was a good year for the bad guys. The successes, he said, came due to action by ISPs, other net bodies and the media rather than from the action of law enforcement agencies. This was mainly due, he said, to the trans-national nature of hi-tech crime that made it very difficult to quickly carry out an investigation and make arrests. “The vast majority of these cases do not seem to go anywhere,” he said.