Cyber Mafia

The monitor your are staring into right now to read these words may well be staring right back at you. There is an increasingly organized - and increasingly dangerous - systematic attack on the internet and its users by criminals. The Washington Post carries the story today.

Computer security experts say 2006 saw an unprecedented spike in junk e-mail and sophisticated online attacks from increasingly organized cyber crooks. These attacks were made possible, in part, by a huge increase in the number of security holes identified in widely used software products.

Few Internet security watchers believe 2007 will be any brighter for the millions of fraud-weary consumers already struggling to stay abreast of new computer security threats and avoiding clever scams when banking, shopping or just surfing online.

One of the best measures of the rise in cyber crime this year is spam. More than 90 percent of all e-mail sent online in October was unsolicited junk mail messages, according to Postini, a San Carlos, Calif.-based e-mail security firm. The volume of spam shot up 60 percent in the past two months alone as spammers began embedding their messages in images to evade junk e-mail filters that search for particular words and phrases.

As a result, network administrators are not only having to deal with considerably more junk mail, but the image-laden messages also require roughly three times more storage space and Internet bandwidth for companies to process than text-based e-mail, said Daniel Druker, Postini's vice president of marketing.

There is quite a lot more. There are cyber shakedown rackets, "Nice website you got there, squire", phishing, hijacking and so much more. In fact it strongly resembles the evolution of organized crime. Heck, it is organized crime. Security experts are not at all happy with what is happening right now.