The worry about Cyber crime is growing more and more in those governmental institutions that deal with Homeland Security, as testified by the incredibly high number of conferences, reports and studies that are released every day.

For instance, October issue of English Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology  is focused on Computer Crime, and it consider the problem starting from the analysis of technological devices that could be subject to an attack, to get to  Computer legislation, statistics on the malicious software that could hit a computer and of course a number of “tips” to avoid the consequences of an attack, or at least to keep them down.

On this proposal, also the U.S. Department of Homeland Security , the SRI International Identity Theft Technology Council, and the Anti-Phishing Working Group worked to issue a report about new frontiers of Cybercrime  where there are specific definitions of  several levels of criminal actions that can be carried out on the digital ground.

The report, known as "The Crimeware Landscape: Malware, Phishing, Identity Theft and Beyond" , highlights the differences between the attacks and outlines some trends in phishing and financially motivated malware.In the report, a new term is used to indicate malware  that performs illegal actions unanticipated by a user running the software, which are intended to yield financial benefits to the distributor of the software: Crimeware.

“Crimeware is a subclass of the more general category of malware, which refers generally to unwanted software running on a user’s computer that perform malicious actions,” the report says.

According to the rdocument, there are four main methods through which Crimeware can be distributed, that are :

-social engineering actions to convince a user to open a malicious email
- content injections attacks such as cross-site scripting  
- exploiting security vulnerabilities
- insertion of crimeware into downloadable software.

Once installed, Crimeware can be used to steal information from company and people, distribute DOS attacks, transmit spam and many additional actions aimed to get financial benefits for the attacker.
In conclusion, Crimeware has been created trough a wide variety of technologies and each category of Crimeware has a characteristic infection point and a data compromise point, that’s why each crimeware needs a specific countermeasure .

A new word to indicate a old problem.. that’s not much, and of course that's not enough to face cyber crime, but it can be considered as the beginning of a deeper knowledge of the "enemy" that could lead to a more proper way to face it.

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test comment Written by astharot on 2006-10-31 15:47:54

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