Is Cyber-crime real? 

It’s a fair enough question to ask.  Every time you hear of an arrest, it is typically some lonely teenager tracked down to the bedroom in his parents’ house.  Or the crime is more a scam exploiting human nature than IT security.   So I was interested to see that the FBI recently busted a “crime ring” which was exploiting 4 million computers.  This story caught my eye because these guys weren’t stealing bank account details - rather they used advertising to make their $14 million.

A lot of spam is funded by commission.  When you click on a link the spammer receives a very small commission for having directed you to the web site.  These hackers took control of 4 million computers redirecting them to websites and collecting the commission.  Anyone using one of these computers would have found them unstable, and in a business environment they would have been unproductive.

Protecting against this is not new.  It is vital to keep your systems up to date and to make sure your anti-virus is running.  That does not sound hard.  But we know that at least 4 million people struggled to do so.  Kinetics knows it’s not easy to stay up to date, you have to be watching and checking all the time and we do that for you with our KARE product.   KARE monitoring and alerting is the foundation of proactive management of a network and is the answer to the $14 million dollar question.  

FBI Press release

http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2011/manhattan-u.s.-attorney-charges-seven-individuals-for-engineering-sophisticated-internet-fraud-scheme-that-infected-millions-of-computers-worldwide-and-manipulated-internet-advertising-business

Trend Micro

http://blog.trendmicro.com/esthost-taken-down-%E2%80%93-biggest-cybercriminal-takedown-in-history

Kinetics Kare

http://www.kinetics.co.nz/products/Pages/KineticsKARE.aspx