Fergie's Tech Blog

The Top Countries For Cybercrime

Andy Greenberg writes on Forbes.com:

Cybercrime, like every digital industry, is outsourcing. Though the U.S. still produces more malware, spam and viruses than any country in the world, illicit IT jobs are increasingly scattered across an anarchic and international Internet, where labor is cheap, legitimate IT jobs are scarce and scammers are insulated from the laws that protect their victims by thousands of miles. As Thomas Friedman might say, the criminal underworld is flat.

Cybercrime this geographically diverse isn't just hard to stop; it's hard to track. Common tactics like phishing and spam are usually achieved with "botnets," herds of PCs hijacked with malware unbeknownst to their owners. Botnet attacks can usually be traced only to the zombie computers, not to their original source. That means the majority of studies mapping botnet attacks point to every place in the world that has vulnerable PCs, with no real sense of where the attacks begin.

posted by Fergie @ 7/16/2007 12:53:00 PM