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| F-Secure.com just published the resulting maps from their study of the shifts in Internet crime trends since 1986. The results are pretty interesting. The map below illustrates that up to the year 2003, criminals from the United States and Europe have been the creators of most malware. According to F-Secure, the time period covered by this map was characterized by “opportunistic ‘hobbyists’ learning their craft” and “old-school virus writers operating from areas in Europe, United States, Australia and India.”
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And then in the “recent history” (is 1986 considered ancient history now?! Am I that old?!), people apparently started getting bored of just playing around and writing viruses and things just to wreak havoc; they wanted to make money or achieve some other goal, so “professional, targeted attacks” started to rise. Here’s how F-Secure describes the characteristics of malware creation in this period:
Malware creation hotspots growing in the former Soviet countries (such as Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia). Other major areas of criminal activity are Brazil and China, which have large numbers of individuals with sophisticated computing skills but without the job opportunities to make a living for themselves in the IT sector. Online crime often presents a more lucrative path to raising living standards for people like these.
I’m not sure these maps are totally accurate. It seems kind of fishy that at least graphically they’ve pinned ALL of the world’s virus-writing guilt on Brazil, Russia, and China. C’mon, guys…Americans aren’t that lazy that they’re gonna let other countries make all the illegal money. I mean, the US pretty much invented the Internet and Internet crime; they’re not going out like chumps. |
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Moving on…the folks at F-Secure now don their prophet caps and look to the future, predicting that in the future, malware will come mostly from Asia with generous helpings coming from Africa and Mexico. Their site makes the following two points:
- “Internet usage is growing fastest in Asia, followed by Africa. IT job growth will be lacking behind, creating a breeding ground for online criminals.”
- “In many countries there will be a delay before the legal system catches up with developments in the IT sector. Computer criminals may also be able to escape the law more easily in countries which are undergoing serious political and security problems.”
It makes perfect sense to me. If the citizens of a country are poor and the government of that country is too busy with its own growing pains or internal struggle to pass and enforce Internet-related laws, naturally people there are gonna take advantage of the situation. Often, in terms of what people will and won’t do, hunger > laws > ethics. So when the chips are down, most people will do whatever they need to put food on the table regardless of ethics or laws, and if there’s no law to telling them they can’t do something, they’re even more likely to give it a shot. Anyway, below is their map of the future of Internet crime.
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| So it looks like we all get to look forward to more virus-laden e-mails trying to trick us into doing the same old things with the same old consequences, only now with even worse English than in the past, probably confusing Rs and Ls throughout. Ah, grobarization! |
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| Link to F-Secure study |
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