The BBC reports that cybercrime rose by 9% in Britain[1]. This is according to Online Identity firm Garlik which release its 2008 Cybercrime Report. The report contains interesting statistics. Among others, identity theft drop from 92 000 offenses in 2006 to 84 700, a 8% drop[2]. Financial fraud rose by 24% and is expected to increase for 2008-2009, mainly due to the financial crisis going on. The report cites the leaked letter from the Home Office indicating a possible rise in crime[3]. This is really no surprise.
Always according to the report, the top three stolen documents for identity theft were non-UK passports, utility bills and UK passports[4]. As for financial cybercrimes, losses from UK victims amounted to £535million (1 billion $CAN, 869 millions $US), up 25% from 2006. The reports further states this interesting bit of information:
“… personal details and identity information are traded online with the 15 Research conducted by Garlik’s team of researchers investigating the presence of illegal trading networks on the Internet, number of trading networks more than doubling (from 27 to 57) over the past nine months. In a typical day, around 520 individual information traders are identified with 19,217 traders being identified this year. Of these, around 700 are ‘long term’ traders …[5]“
Cybercrime in the UK rose by more than 9% in 2007
That’s 57 trading network and around 20 000 traders, which, at least for me, is a big number. But the report doesn’t specify how those traders were identified though. The 700 “long-term” traders are seemed to be identified only with their online alias. Therefore if the “20 000 traders” is counted using aliases, this number might be higher than the actual number of traders.
The reports do not goes into great details on how the criminals get the information, but it does mention Trojans, phishing and SQL injections as a way to retrieve the information. As for the damage caused by these for UK companies, 830 000 companies report a computer-related incident last year. Viruses accounted for 21% of those incidents and are on the decline.
Fortunately, the report also mention lack of data protection from the government but fail to give any number, since it’s outside the scope of the document. But shouldn’t it be considered so? Shouldn’t this be considered as criminal negligence? After all, lost data impact lives and can lead to disaster for the victims of this negligence…
