What is cybercrime and what is its scale in financial terms? It covers profitable criminal activities involving use of computers and networks, but estimating its economic impact is not easy, since only a third of its victims lodge complaints. Yet according to an adviser to the US government, ‘. . . last year [2006] profits from cybercrime were some $105 billion, or greater than the profits from the drug trade’.
Dirty Money on the Internet: Cybercriminals' Economic Models
Fraudsters, phishers, bot herders, spammers, online extortion specialists, identity thiefs, etc.—the names may be obscure, but the intentions are not: they are all there to steal our money.
It is no secret today that cybercriminals steal enormous sums of money every year, worldwide. And while the old-fashioned hackers just hired themselves out for a limited amount of industrial espionage activity, the cybercriminals of today combine the techniques of user abuse, viruses, Trojan Horses and spyware to target the ordinary user. Who are these people, and do they have a common profile? What is their economic model, and is it easy to get started? What methods do they use to get paid, and where does the money end up? And are ‘real’ organised criminals (the Mafia) implicated in this model at various levels?
This paper attempts to throw some light on these questions. The answers will be developed, correlated and demonstrated by data, outlines and concrete figures.
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