According to the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, the world is loosing about one Trillion dollars a year due to credit card and wire fraud (I picked their estimate because it was the highest).
There has been an 80% jump in credit card and wire fraud in the last two years. Crime syndicates are to blame. This increase in cybercrime will continue. It seems that the business model is very attractive to them:
- Hire a few programmers worldwide to scan thousands of IT systems for security holes . Often, the bulk of the scanning is done by thousands of home and business computers that are remote controlled into doing this work. The computer's owners are not aware that their computer is doing this work in the background. Spyware and viruses are the primary method by which an unsuspecting person's computer is remote controlled to do this work. Specific industries are usually targeted such as third party credit card processing firms.
- An alternative method to collect this information is to send millions of random emails nicely asking people to hand over or "verify" their banking information. Incredibly this works.
- The results of these scans are then passed to the crime syndicate staff programmers for focused and advanced attacks. These programmers are typically in foreign countries where US law Enforcement has limited or no influence.
- Once a system is breached, identity, credit card and banking information is collected.
- This collected information is used to electronically steal money or goods.
This type of crime is currently very low risk, low investment and high return for the crime syndicates. What can you do?
- Do not connect your PC directly to your cable modem. At a minimum use any of the Cable/DSL Routers made by companies such as Netgear or Linksys or most any other brand. Their presence alone will stop over 90% of malware from reaching your computer.
- Make sure that your antivirus and anti-spyware software are current. I can recommend McAfee or AVG for antivirus and, Spybot and Malwarebytes for anti-spyware. Many other products are also excellent.
- Do not answer any requests that you receive in email to update or give or verify your banking information. Your bank will never ever ask you for this in an email
- Do not open any attachments that you are not expecting, regardless of who they are from.
- Review your credit card bill for unexpected charges, including monthly charges for small amounts such as $3.59.
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