Microsoft Seeking Serious Action Against Cyber Crime

Tim Cranton, while addressing a Council of Europe conference said, in comparison to 2005 the number of attacks of virus on PC has taken a leap of 11% to reach 63,000 a day last year (2006), as per the news reported by Physorg on June 11, 2007. Cranton is the senior attorney for Microsoft and the director of the firm's Internet security enforcement programs.

As per a document of council of Europe document, 90% of mails are considered to be spam at present. Cranton further added that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation's Internet Fraud Complaint Centre had found that the region suffered damages worth US$ 267.24 Billion due to cyber crime last year.

Cranton said that hackers were using bots to increase the intensity of virus attacks on the networks of computers.

Eva Chen, CEO Trend Micro, said that hacking is estimated to be a US$ 8 Billion industry. Moreover, this industry is nicely packed with stolen items that carry well-define price tags as well. The number of botnet controlled PCs had almost tripled in 2006, and the reasons are yet to be discovered, as per the news published by ITbusiness on June 11, 2007.

Botnets are network of "bots" or zombie PCs - machines commandeered and used by bot masters for carrying out various nasty activities such as scanning other vulnerable software, sending spam emails, launching denial of service attacks against specific targets, key stroke logging as an act preceding ID or password theft, etc.

Cranton added that the havoc caused due to bots or zombies had increased since 2005, mainly because the hackers were able to hide themselves as anonymous users. According to Cranton, fighting against these threats isn't an easy task and the industry has decided to work together with the law enforcement agencies and govt. to stop it, as published by Physorg on June 11, 2007.

Unsolicited emails usually come with undetectable Trojan viruses, which, in turn, appear as attachments. Online auction houses can't be trusted fully, since if someone gets to see an advertisement selling a car at 10% of its actual price, either it has been stolen or a fantasy, as per Christian Aghroum, who carries forward the aim of fighting technology - related crimes in French Interior ministry in Paris. Physorg published Aghroum's statement on June 11, 2007.

Related article: Microsoft Patches Live OneCare to Tackle Quarantined E-Mails

» SPAMfighter News - 6/28/2007