Finjan applauds new cybercrime report: raises concerns
1 min read
Secure web gateway developer Finjan says that businesses should be concerned about findings in the UK cybercrime report, published by Garlik, the IT security consultancy.
According to Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan’s CTO, one of the most worrying figures is the estimate that there were 207,000 online financial crimes in the UK alone during 2006 – a rise of 32% on the previous year.
“This rapid growth in online fraud is dominated by CNP [cardholder not present] crime, but CNP fraud still only accounted for 49% of e-frauds during 2006 – leaving a swathe of other cybercrimes to watch out for,” he says.
He points to “clear parallels” with Finjan’s own quarterly web security trends report, but adds that the Garlik report is noteworthy since it spans a wide variety of issues, including ID theft, financial fraud, offences against the person, computer misuse and sexual offences.
“It’s clear from the report that financial fraud is growing from a minor problem on the cybercrime horizon into a serious issue for the law enforcement agencies,” he asserts.
“It’s interesting to note that Garlik reports there being 28.5 million adults now online in the UK, but it’s also worth noting that the latest figures from Internetworldstats.com put the global Internet user base at around the 1,173 million mark this year “ he adds.
Against this backdrop, Finjan observes that companies need to do everything they can to protect themselves against cybercrime.
“The sheer scale of financial fraud on the Internet means that electronic crimes are now more prevalent than conventional fraud,” warns Ben-Itzhak.
His view: companies need to install multi-faceted security systems on their IT resource to prevent “the tidal wave of cybercrime” hitting them where it hurts.
“IT managers need to be aware of this latest evolution in crimeware, as Finjan’s research confirms that attempts to pattern malicious code and create signatures, or to categorize known malicious sites, are clearly ‘too little, too late’ when it comes to providing adequate protection to today’s dynamic and evasive web threats. The way to detect modern malicious code is to be able to understand in real-time what the code intends to do, before it does it,” insists Ben-Itzhak.
