"Cybercrime: A Secret Under Ground Economy" in correlation with information security

"Cybercrime: a secret underground economy"

This article denounces the stereotype of geeks creating and sending out viruses and maintains that it is a growing industry. Cyber criminals steal one’s personal information such as credit card numbers or bank account numbers by way of malware, spyware viruses, Trojan horses etc. And then sell that information online to a third party. David Goldman describes this as a “multi-billion dollar business” and goes on to that if every stolen credit card was wiped clean last year that would have totaled some 8 billion dollars.
One must ask so what is the government doing to prevent these crimes? Well the FBI is currently going undercover in IRC (internet relay chat rooms) and posing as cyber criminal. Once a criminal is caught they offered deals in order to get them to help turn over more cyber criminals although Goldman cites Albert Gonzalez in saying that doesn’t always work one can always look at the TJ Max situation. A situation where a cyber criminal was working for the FBI in order to get vital information that helped his friends evade detection (cnn.com, 1). According to eh article Rowan Trollope the senior vice president of product development at Symantec the current anti-virus technology is not enough one must perform personal step to educate oneself in order to say safe from cyber criminals.
This directly correlates with this week’s text because it involves the technological aspect of protecting vital information but also states that one must also encompass an educational aspect to the technology in order to have information lost due to human error. In a discussion with one of my co-worker I discovered that Norton and McAfee antivirus systems were not that great because they are the most popular antivirus programs used and thus make it more attractive for hackers to get breach. My co-worker a computer technician recommended AVG and various other antivirus programs as alternative.

David Goldman, CNNMoney.com staff writer
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/16/technology/cybercrime/index.htm?postversion=2009091613