‘Cybercrime’ Articles

According to a new article in the Wall Street Journal, cybercrime has significantly risen 22.3% in 2009 from 2008. Identity thieves and white collar criminals have taken to the internet and caused over $550 million in reported losses. There were also over 60,000 more complaints of cybercrime in 2009. Many experts say the plummeting economy is responsible for the great rise last year.

The article goes on to discuss the new and more technologically savvy way that criminals are stealing our information.

Criminals’ tactics also are changing, with a growing number of crimes involving malicious applications installed on mobile devices and embedded in news and celebrity gossip Web sites. In this type of crime, Web criminals are using search-engine optimization to allow fake Web sites to rise to the top of searches. When users click on the links or pop-ups, malware or key loggers infect their computers, usually with the intent of hijacking personal and financial information such as bank passwords and account information. Scam artists also are switching from email to social-networking sites to perpetrate “phishing” scams designed to steal sensitive information from victims.

Top scams now include nondelivery of ordered merchandise, fraudulent emails claiming to be from the FBI seeking personal and financial information, identity theft, credit-card fraud, online auction fraud, and job and investment scams. Online auction fraud, which was a top complaint in the past, has declined and losses have fallen as awareness and auction-site security protections have improved, officials said.

At the Privacy Project, our success is your nightmare (unless you are my speaking agent).

Business at the Sileo Group and engagements as an identity theft speaker are up 400% compared with the same period last year. I am booked for exactly 4X as many identity theft prevention and privacy leadership speeches in the first quarter of 2009 as I was in 2008; and 2008 brought me more work than I could handle on my own. Some of this is due to an extensive contract with the Department of Defense, but not all of it.

I’m not sharing our success to blow my own horn, though admittedly, it is satisfying to finally share some good news with you after having lost so much to this crime.

I’m sharing because our success gave me cold sweats at 3am this morning.

Why? Because the strength of my business is inversely proportional to the safety of yours. My business is thriving because identity theft is thriving, and that is not my purpose for being in business. I am in the identity theft prevention business to put myself out of a job. When I say it keeps me awake at night, I’m being sincere. At 3am this morning, I spent several hours deciphering the underlying causes responsible for the exploding demand for identity theft speakers… even as the meetings and speaking business has suffered drastically at the hands of the spiraling economy. And then it came to me; I realized that the answer was contained in the question…