Cyber-crime crackdown

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/24/1053585741118.html

May 25 2003
By Nathan Cochrane

The newly minted Australian High Tech Crime Centre could collect its
first scalp on Thursday when a 17-year-old faces the Adelaide Youth
Court charged with a single count of illicitly receiving $4890 from an
ANZ customer's internet banking account.

It will be alleged that the youth received proceeds from an
unauthorised internet banking transaction after the funds were
transferred to Adelaide.

Agents from the Crime Centre and South Australian police raided a home
last week where they arrested the youth. Other charges are expected to
be laid, a spokesman for the Australian Federal Police said.

The High Tech Crime Centre is an AFP creation and will be hosted at
the AFP's headquarters in Canberra. It was created, in part, as a
response to the rising tide of computer break-ins by outside hackers
detailed in the latest Computer Crime and Security Survey released
earlier this month.

The Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), together
with state and federal police, found that although the rate of cyber
crime had fallen, the likelihood that it would be perpetrated by
outside hackers had increased.

In the 2002 survey, 67 per cent of respondent organisations reported
an intrusion, compared with 42 per cent in the latest figures. But
external attacks that damaged computer systems or data afflicted 91
per cent of respondents, while just 36 per cent came from within
organisations.

That is a turnaround from earlier studies identifying malicious
insiders with legitimate network access, such as disgruntled
employees, as the main weak spot in an organisation's computer
security.

AusCERT blames the increasing reliance on the insecure internet for
the rise in external hacking attempts.

Security and law enforcement agencies are cracking down globally on
computer crime as part of the broader war on terrorism.

Thai police last week, at the urging of the US Secret Service,
arrested a 25-year-old Ukrainian man, Maksym Kovalchuk, who is alleged
to be the mastermind behind a $3 million global software piracy and
internet fraud ring.



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