Can you hack it in world of growing cyber crime?

MEET THE MAN BATTLING THE GROWING THREAT

CYBER crime might not soundd particularly exciting but it’s the fastest growing area of crime in the UK and internationally today.

It’s impossible to get a handle on how much it costs the world economy every year because so much of it goes unreported and undetected.

But what can be said with some certainty is that the bill goes in to the tens of billions.

Anyone can be a victim of this evolving menace. Individuals, businesses, even nations – no one is immune.

One of the biggest problems is that, as technology changes and expands rapidly, so do the threats – and we’re not keeping up.

Alistair Irons, academic dean of computer science for the University of f Sunderland,S d l d is trying to changeh that.

The 54 year old, originally from Stranraer, Scotland, has been working on tackling this issue on Wearside for ten years.

He worked in digital forensics before transitioning to the academic study of cyber security.

Mr Irons said: “One of the biggest problems is getting people to pay attention to this issue.

“There’s a perception out there that it is a victimless crime because no one is breaking into anyone’s house or hitting anyone over the head with a baseball bat.

“But it’s not nice having your bank details stolen or private pictures taken from your phone.

“And“d peoplel need d to knowk thath theh proceeds from cyber crime are used to fund other sorts of crime.

“This money is going into things like drug trafficking, people trafficking, terrorism.

“And then there’s the issue of the dark web, where the distribution of child sex abuse images occurs.

“This money funds an underground network of crime.”

This is what cyber crime comes down to, as all crime usually does – money. The police know this too. Detective Sergeant Martin Wilson, regional cyber protect co-ordinator for the north east, said: “Technology is a force for good and is changing the way we live our lives.

“However,“thereh are elementsl in our society who seek to take advantage of our growing use of the internet and exploit vulnerabilities’ in networks and end-point users.

“The motivations for cyber criminals are numerous and varied, but predominately it’s about making money, by holding data to ransom, and making extortion demands.”

Mr Irons ranks cyber crime threats on levels from one to five.

Level five, the least serious, encompasses things like nuisance attacks – the teenage hacker on a laptop at home trying to steal UFO documents from the Pentagon.

The top level, defined as “advanced persistent threats”, is where the worlds of cyber security and geopoli-

tics meet and whereh nations are engaged d in a shadh d owy war to sabotage one another’s infrastructure, elections and military systems.

The government recently revealed that there were 188 serious attacks on the nation’s digital frameworks in the three months at the start of this year.

In between is serious organised crime, “hacktivism” (think Julian Assange and Edward Snowden) and insider corporate crime.

The latter on that list is emerging as a major issue in the world of business – it is estimated that between 30-40% of money lost through crime across the economy now comes from cyber crime.

What is more worrying than the range of threats out there is how ill-