A McAfee study shows that in 2008 the main threat to the security of citizens worldwide will be cybercrime. Organized groups, trafficking networks online and silent attacks on e-mail servicesbanking are more and more frequent. Throughout this year, several countries have accused other regions of systematic attacks.
In McAfee’s Virtual Criminology Report, which had the collaboration of organizations such as NATO, the FBI and SOCA, as well as other specialized entities, some trends were evident, including the fact that governments use the Internet as a vehicle for attacks and cyber-espionage or the increasingly frequent threats to air traffic control, financial markets and government computer networks.
According to McAfee accounts, there are now close to 120 countries using the Internet for espionage and many of the online attacks have come from China, a country where censorship is greater than freedom of expression.
NATO experts say that many governments are not aware of new trends in espionage, thus neglecting security in this field.
Estonia is one of the examples of attacks in what they have already called «cyber war». For several weeks, the government and the country’s news and banking servers were affected. The botnets they were the means of attack in a carefully constructed strategy that passed by the Estonian security systems.
Jeff Green, Senior Vice President of Avert Labs and McAfee Product Development, said in a statement that «cybercrime is a global issue […], technology is only part of the solution and in the next 5 years international governments will have to take action «.
The United Kingdom has already dubbed this phase a «cold cyberwar», where the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom drop the charges at China, calling it «the most active country in this new type of espionage».
This year alone, the United States’ systems have already registered 37,000 attempts at stealth entry, both in government and private networks. The fear of the consequences of this type of threat is such that the country’s Air Force has already created a new section with 40 thousand people who are preparing defense strategies in the face of this new type of war.
Related News:
2007-11-19 – Democratizing access and combating cyber crime among UN priorities
