Cyber wars: a major threat to global security?

06 May, 2009, 14:22

Leading internet companies say the money gained from cyber-crime is outpacing the amount raked in by global drug trafficking.

And hackers from Russia and China are considered to be among the chief culprits.

And hackers from Russia and China are considered to be among the chief culprits.

Europe and America suffer the most, with the U.S. Defense Department spending more than one hundred million dollars over the past six months to improve the nation's cyber security.

Read more

The implication of these tough measures, according to internet expert Ivan Zasursky, is that nothing on the internet can be secured. However, he notes that Russia “isn’t the biggest threat on the street," with the more severe one being China.

“Russia’s hackers have been sucked away by the internet boom, and most of the professional programmers have moved into commercial business,” Zasursky explained to RT.

Those who are still hacking are mostly small-scale credit card stealing criminals, but the market for online crime is getting smaller as the internet economy grows.

Andrey Mikhailuk, the editor-in-chief of a major Russian IT magazine “Zhelezo” agrees with this judgment:

“Guys who were hackers in the beginning of this century are really professionals. They work, and they get enough money to make themselves comfortable,” he said.

Nevertheless, Russia is still highlighted as a major nest of internet crime. This, according to Mikhailuk, may relate to the fact that the country has relatively weak cyber policing. However, this situation is rapidly changing:

“Many people who worked in IT have now lost their jobs due to the financial crisis,” Mikhailuk noted. “Now, for them, working in cyber policing is the only option.”

Ivan Zasursky says that, internationally, cyber crime will be sucked away by the market which will attract the best people, at least in the countries which enjoy a stable political situation and an open economy.

“In states like China, on the other hand, most of the programming workforce will work in state agencies,” he adds.

The situation at the moment, however, is far from ideal – cyber crime is still a major threat. Most attacks on PCs are part of wide scale plans. However, as Ivan Zasursky points out, the most difficult part is understanding the reasoning behind them.

Both Ivan Zasursky and Andrey Mikhailuk agree that PC users could do a better job in protecting their private data, and that many internet attacks are simply the result of common carelessness.