Imagine the case of the botnets that Microsoft says they have ended, they were the same programs initiated and running constantly for many years before people even found them and found ways of disabling them. They were running all the time and nobody raised a finger to get them off-line because, they were driving the IT security industry to some extent. That is paradoxical for the IT security industry is alive because of these threats. Old ones revived with new routines and made to do more mischief, stealing information, credit card numbers and more. The cyber-world may be more secure but as long as people are at the helm, there will be holes and these holes will be seen and used for profit, sometimes by the people entasked with providing security themselves.

As sad as it may be, cyber criminals are an integral part of our online society as criminals are part of our real world. This is what a whitepaper on Information Week says and to some extent this is true for as long as there is opportunity, there are those that will seize them for their own benefit. Virtual crime is becoming a real headache for security experts worldwide and they’re not just dumping tons of spam on your mailbox, they’re taking information right from under your nose without you even knowing it. Phishing, Vishing and malware all share a common trait that any weakness is quickly discovered and turned into a money making venture. Cyber criminals are quite difficult to apprehend for unlike real criminals that leave behind DNA and other stuff for forensics to take on and analyze, these cyber-criminals operate with utmost anonymity.

The US government is one of the most targeted entities on the internet with daily attacks and other moves to get secrets for profit, selling them on the black-market to the highest bidder. Such moves can tax users so much that they end up in debt often even without suspicion that something happened to them while using the internet. Thankfully, the US has had a great improvement of IT security during the previous years, beefing up and placing newer and better defenses yearly. Not the same can be said for the UK government on the same area where government highly confidential information can be bought as an added bonus off eBay contained in a laptop which could also have belonged to the government. So muck for top secret?!!!?

These companies have long been in the eyes of criminals but they have fallen prey to another from of the same people with a different glorified name, cyber-criminals. These criminals nonetheless are after only one thing, and that is to get stuff on other people’s expense which has cost companies millions in lost profits every year. Citibank, Bank of America, HSBC, AT&T and Sprint are just some of them. These thieves in sheep’s clothing do this through phishing site’s, system intrusion through backdoors and many other methods which change as they are discovered but not after they go away with tons of free stuff.

Many attempts by business and even governments to block unauthorized internet access and usage has failed miserably for the internet has broken out of the wired form giving it added access points with the advent of wireless technology. Mobile computing products are gaining ground as offices go into the wireless office. The mischief occurs when an unsuspecting user does a search and gets a seemingly relevant list of results which have been in fact loaded with malicious code that can trick people into believing they are at a relevant site which is in fact a phishing site that takes information from them then passes them onto the valid site without even knowing any malicious activity has occurred.

Cyber-criminals have been found to be using search engines to inject unauthorized code into search engine results that target or use familiar sites such as Torrent Reactor and ZDnet leaving many vulnerable to attack. They have capitalized on the process where search engines collect and collate relevant results placing code in between the reflected results making searching on them quite risky for many. One of these so-called piggy-back cases had a site associated with Russian Business Network and having visitors tot he site install a fake antivirus program which obtains information on the unsuspecting visitor. These types of attacks can have more dangerous consequences such as the depositing of malicious code into servers through workstations used by employees who are at work.

United States law enforcement agencies have long used the centralized database systems for storing information on criminals and other law breaking activities for inter-agency cooperation. The FBI has proposed a new system which would also contain more biometric information included with the old photos, rap sheets and biographical information in hopes to boost the capability of crime prevention and investigation units in getting information. The said plan gets many critics due to many problems that are foreseen to come with a new system such as the fact that the agency’s network and computers are some of the most attacked computers on earth. The transmission of all information regarding an investigation is to be sent to the FBI first before all other agencies, which raises questions on the transmission security of the said information. The system in place that has been modified for Homeland Security has a lot of flaws wherein many people with misdemeanors get arrested as “terrorists”. There is no contesting the fact that there is a need for such a system but further testing and development should be done as many experts see the plan. The security and reliability of the government should be prioritized and developed to the full capability of current technology for it to remain acceptable and adaptable for the times to come.