Cyber-crime crackdown

2003-05-27 07:03

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/24/1053585741118.html May 25 2003 By Nathan Cochrane The newly minted Australian High Tech Crime Centre could collect its first scalp on Thursday when a 17-year-old faces the Adelaide Youth Court charged with a single count of illicitly receiving $4890 from an ANZ customer's internet banking account. It will be alleged that the youth received proceeds from an unauthorised internet banking transaction after the funds were transferred to Adelaide. Agents from the Crime Centre and South Australian police raided a home last week where they arrested the youth. Other charges are expected to be laid, a spokesman for the Australian Federal Police said. The High Tech Crime Centre is an AFP creation and will be hosted at the AFP's headquarters in Canberra. It was created, in part, as a response to the rising tide of computer break-ins by outside hackers detailed in the latest Computer Crime and Security Survey released earlier this month. The Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), together with state and federal police, found that although the rate of cyber crime had fallen, the likelihood that it would be perpetrated by outside hackers had increased. In the 2002 survey, 67 per cent of respondent organisations reported an intrusion, compared with 42 per cent in the latest figures. But external attacks that damaged computer systems or data afflicted 91 per cent of respondents, while just 36 per cent came from within organisations. That is a turnaround from earlier studies identifying malicious insiders with legitimate network access, such as disgruntled employees, as the main weak spot in an organisation's computer security. AusCERT blames the increasing reliance on the insecure internet for the rise in external hacking attempts. Security and law enforcement agencies are cracking down globally on computer crime as part of the broader war on terrorism. Thai police last week, at the urging of the US Secret Service, arrested a 25-year-old Ukrainian man, Maksym Kovalchuk, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind a $3 million global software piracy and internet fraud ring. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.

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