RISING TIDE OF CYBER CRIME
Cyber crime has become a global issue and costs the UK billions of pounds. Julian Cole meets one of the experts helping to shed light on a dark corner of the web.
WHAT AN incongruous place to be talking about cyber crime. Professor David Wall is sitting in his large terrace house in York. A fire is lit, his two small terriers have settled down after some introductory barking, and we are drinking peppermint tea.
It all seems a long way from dark goings-on on the web, devious cybercriminals and theories about whether Russian hackers tinkered with the US presidential election (probably, says Prof Wall). But that’s the thing with cyber crime: it’s not visible and can happen anywhere at any time.
Wall, 60, is the professor of criminology at Leeds University and runs the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies in the School of Law. He researches and teaches cyber crime, identity crime, organised crime, policy and intellectual property crime. He has written almost as many crime books as Ian Rankin, although of a different sort, and is the go-to man for cyber crime.
Wall is setting up a new cyber crime unit in Leeds, and has plans for the next three to five years. “I’ve got a team of young people around me to do these projects,” he says. “Four or five basically, plus PhD students, and they’re really excellent, they’re tomorrow’s people. The team is not just in Leeds, that’s the nuclear family. There is an extended family of about 30 others in different countries and different places.”
In his November budget, Chancellor Philip Hammond set aside £1.9bn to boost Britain’s defences against the online threat to our personal and national security.
It’s money that is much needed. In the Cyber Crime Assessment 2016, the National Crime Agency estimated that the “cost of cyber crime to the UK economy is billions of pounds per annum – and growing”.
The agency believes that underreporting of the crime can obscure its impact on the UK. The Office of National Statistics included cyber crime for the first time in the National Crime Survey for England and Wales in 2015 as a trial and estimated there were 2.46 million cyber incidents – far higher than the reported number of cyber crimes.
It can be hard to pin down exactly where the criminals are operating, but the Cyber Crime Assessment said: “The skills and sophistication of international crime groups make them the most competent and dangerous cyber criminals targeting UK businesses.”
But what is cyber crime? Definitions can be hard to pin down. Over to Prof Wall: “It extends the reach of criminals. Cyber crime is potentially global. You can’t send things along the internet, but you can send information that causes things to happen. And that is really the best definition of it. It’s almost like one of these elastic concepts that covers a whole range of different crimes. And many of the crimes are not technically crimes in law.”
One person can commit many offences, some so small they cannot be pursued in the public interest. And the internet has changed the way criminals operate.
“Instead of committing a highrisk £50m robbery, a criminal using the internet can commit 50 million low-risk one pound robberies using a networked computer,” says Wall. “And the changes of scale that cloud technologies have brought now allow the same criminal to commit 50 billion robberies of 0.1 pence .... ”
The language of cyber crime may puzzle the uninitiated: bitcoins, worms, phishing. There is also the possibility that the internet may take out your kettle (but only if it is a ‘smart’ kettle connected to the internet – and, perhaps, smart people shouldn’t buy those).
Is it hard to predict where the cyber-criminals will hit next? “Yes and no,” says Wall. “It’s hard to predict accurately but we know that cloud technologies are changing cyber crime. We know that there are changes in the things that go online. The internet of things is increasing very broadly the number of devices and the depth of information that is going online.” And could such information fall into the wrong hands? The simple answer is “yes.”
Crimes that existed before the internet can be “cyber-assisted”, such as a criminal using the internet to research now to kill someone or how to manufacture drugs. “Cyber-enabled” crimes are established crimes for which the internet provides criminals with new, global opportunities, such as pyramid selling and online scams. Then there are the “cyber-dependent” crimes that are, as Dave puts it, the “spawn of the internet” – “Think spamming, phishing, ransomware and scareware.”
These crimes often depend on the unwise participation of the victim. With ransomware, people are manipulated into clicking on a link or attachment. “Their computer will just freeze,” says Dave. “And the only way they can get this freed is to respond to the demands and pay someone to fix the problem.”
Only last week Action Fraud and North Yorkshire Police have received several reports from victims who have been sent convincing looking emails claiming to be from Amazon. Wall was among them. “I’ve had two (emails). Everybody’s bought a lot of things from Amazon recently, and this one told me that my account was going to be frozen. But when I clicked onto the email address that was sending it to me but there was an ‘o’ missing in Amazon. It was clearly a scam.” Amazon never asks for personal information to be supplied by e-mail and says suspicious emails often contain attachments or grammatical errors.
This might worry some people but Wall points out that you wouldn’t cross a road with your eyes shut or walk around town with £10 notes sticking out of your back pocket – yet people still click on an unknown link in an email.
At present the Leeds cyber crime unit is investigating the criminal potential in the cloud, the mass storage service that uses up spare space on routers and servers. “The one crime that people seem to not think about is what happens if someone steals the cloud with everyone’s data inside?” he says.
His team is also working with Greater Manchester Police on criminal use of bitcoins: An internet-only crypto-currency favoured by criminals but with many legitimate uses, too.
Despite his concerns Wall remains an optimist about the internet, and feels only the bad side is reported. Take the London riots of 2011. “The actual cause of the London riots was quite deep and people blamed the social media network,” he says. “And it certainly allowed them to come together much more quickly. But the solution – Boris Johnson’s clean-up campaign – was also a product of social media, and dispersing the riots once they’d started.”
So it does have a good side, something we perhaps ought to remind ourselves from time to time.
Instead of committing a high-risk £50m robbery, a criminal using the internet can commit 50 million lowrisk one pound robberies using a networked computer.
David Wall, professor of criminology at the University of Leeds.