Economic Crash a Boom For Cyber criminals
December 21, 2008 by AntivirusWare.The economic downturn has given cyber criminals a big advantage in their war against law enforcement, according to a panel of experts at McAfee, the antivirus software manufacturer in a recently released report.
Amid the global downturn in the economy, cyber criminals appear to be winning in the war against law enforcement. That’s the sobering conclusion drawn by a panel of experts in a report from McAfee released Tuesday.
Cyber criminals mobilized to take advantage of the downturn very quickly, according to the report. They are cashing in on consumer anxiety, especially around the holidays. As more and more people scour the internet for better deals, criminals are preying on their inexperience in order to lure them to bogus sites and suck them into get rick quick schemes. The volume of malware has also risen dramatically in the last twelve months.
One popular scam recruits online job seekers as “cyber mules” in online money laundering. It’s not a mule in the traditional sense wherein they carry drugs across distances and/or borders, but they are lured into what they think is a job and in reality they are laundering money by passing it through additional hands so that law enforcement officials have a more difficult trail to follow back to the thieves. Protect yourself from these scams by searching for jobs from legit sites like Monster.com rather than responding to Google ads.
Governments are focused on their own internal hardships rather than the fight against international cyber crime. Thus, McAfee predicts cyber crime will continue to escalate in the near term.