Monday 19 November 2007

Russia and China: shamed as worst offenders

Should not come as a surprise that China and Russia represent major threats for the online world; the amount of money at stake, and also the political stance, makes it to attractive to avoid spying, hacking, 'zombying' and the like. The only difference between the two countries: Chinese cybercrime remains state-orientated and controlled; Russian cybercrime seemed more privately "owned" although the complacency of the Russia state can be argued to amount to complicity...
But is the West really that big fat cow that needs to be milked? (see the article on the guardian about the RBN) Maybe, but cybercrime here is not about redistributing wealth to the masses, rather redistributing it to a very small number of people using crime to increase their own personal profits. In this respect, I strongly opposed the Guardian's line stating that the "RBN was founded and is run by techies, not career criminals." A career in crime is no longer about being a thief in the physical world: actually, it brings more money to go online than to stay offline...

On Russia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/15/news.crime
and http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39290683,00.htm

On China
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39290843,00.htm

and more generally, although... http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39291200,00.htm (3rd December 2007)
"Cracking open the cybercrime economy (14 December 2007) http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/features/0,1000002000,39291463,00.htm

1 comment:

Audrey Guinchard said...

does not seem to improve "Russian Business Network was also heavily linked to distribution of malicious code" http://www.crime-research.org/news/05.05.2008/3348/ (8 May 2008)