Huge growth in cyber crime

2007-11-14 14:05

Bloemfontein - Computer-related crime is one of the fastest growing forms of crime worldwide, the security head of a Centurion based ICT company said on Wednesday.

Wolfgang Selzer, head of security at Exponant, said in 2005 white collar crime in South Africa was reported by Business Against Crime as running in excess of R40bn billion a year.

"If the South African trends follow that of the rest of the world, we can safely assume that cyber criminals are responsible for a sizeable portion of that," said Selzer in a statement.

He said CEO of leading computer anti-virus company McAfee, David DeWalt recently indicated that cyber-crime had become a R703bn business that now surpassed the value of the international illegal drug trade.

Selzer said many companies continued to underestimate the threat from phishing, data loss, cyber identity theft, information leakage and other cyber vulnerabilities.

Links to 419 scams

It was very much alive and well in South Africa, as evidenced by the fact that tens of thousands of South Africans received weekly emails from phishing sites purporting to be from the big four banks - asking them to disclose sensitive information such as their account details and passwords.

"There is a strong suspicion that many of the phishing operators are part of the Nigerian 419 scam that has been defrauding unsuspecting punters for many years."

Selzer said there was a low awareness of cyber-security threats in corporate South Africa and the government, and that little was being done to safeguard networks, servers and PCs.

"The majority of users still believe that an anti-virus programme offers sufficient protection."

Selzer said as the world had become a smaller place, thanks to the internet and other emerging technologies, a significant amount of threats from increasingly sophisticated groups attacking networks around the world had surfaced.

"The emergence of new platforms and devices present cyber-criminals with new opportunities for hacks and phishing scams."

Selzer said laws addressing cyber criminals needed attention.

"Despite efforts to tighten up the legal framework to deal with cyber criminals, a petty thief is still more likely to serve a longer sentence than the CEO of a major corporation that has defrauded his company of tens of millions of rand," he said.

- SAPA