Why IT Security Must Combat Organized Cybercrime

Ditch the Hollywood stereotypes. These guys don’t wear wide ties or spats, have flattened noses, or speak with strange accents. Nor do they have a fictional HBO series. They do, however, have highly-specialized contractor/employee rolls. They work out of the box and they are attracting some of the best computer talent all over the world. In the last six years, organized cybercrime has become serious business.

In late July, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated the total direct and indirect costs of all cybercrime at $137 billion. Some private estimates peg organized cybercrime for nearly 70 billion of those dollars. That’s more than the annual gross revenue of some of the Fortune 100 companies for 2006.

You can also forget the image of the miscreant in a parent’s basement. These are groups of criminals, not script kiddies.

According to Dan Larkin, a unit chief in the FBI’s Cyber Initiative and Resources Fusion Unit (think cybercrime), "From our perspective, today it is an organized criminal threat, not what we traditionally called organized crime but very parallel. Like organized crime, they have specialized talents such as the safecracker or the lookout or the wheelman or the money launderer or recruiters for mules to move merchandize.