Tag: scam

Internet-Based Crime Rises by 33%

March 31st, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Internet One comment - Tags: , , , , , ,

Internet-based crime has dramatically increased by 33% last year according to The Internet Crime Complaint Center.

IC3 released a report today with rather dramatic and surprising results – Cybercrime is on the rise following two straight years of decline. The graph below explains the full situation:

Source: IC3

Source: IC3

As we  can see by the bar chart above, complaints have been steadily decreasing since 2005. That is until the economic crisis hit and people started becoming desperate. In 2008, the number of reported cases of internet-based crime rose from 206,884 complaints to over 275,000. That’s a massive and unexpected jump.

Although complaints have suddenly increased, damage hasn’t:

Source: IC3

Source: IC3

The dollar-loss damage by these crimes has actually been increasing steadily since 2005, annually jumping to a larger sum than the year before.

This begs the question: Has cybercrime really increased at such a rapid pace since 2007? Or is it simply the fact that users were unaware they were being scammed and have only taken up reporting these fraudulent crimes because money is difficult to come by now?

Spam Returns to 94% of All Emails Sent

March 31st, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Internet No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

spam

In November 2008, McColo corp was shutdown by a group of security experts from a US web hosting firm. McColo was a web-hosting servers that spammers, scammers and hackers were using exclusively to spam people with emails and to co-ordinate large spamming attacks. Immediately after McColo was shutdown spam traffic dropped a massive 70% according to Postini (anti-spam division of Google), much to the joy and cheers of internet folk all over.

Unfortunately, the good news ends here. Since the November shutdown of McColo, the spammers have since recovered and have made the necessary shift from static nodes (like McColo) into a more peer-to-peer based system. In other words, spam is back and it’s going to be more difficult to shut down in the future.

“What the spammers have been using to rebuild is more technically advanced than what got taken out and is itself a more resilient technology,”

Postini announced recently that spam levels have risen back to their previous levels – 94% of all emails sent worldwide are spam.

Spam truly is back, and here to stay.