Hackers and web stores
Date: March 12, 2004Source: Computer Crime Research Center
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E-commerce is the cause of the record growth of crimes, VeriSign reports. Turnovers of web stores increase rapidly but computer crimes grow faster. VeriSign company, an official administrator of .com and .net domains published regular report on criminal activity over the Internet. Statistics shows increase in attacks, Internet fraud and using other's credit cards (identity theft). Hacker attacks become more and more frequent due to impetuous spread of e-commerce.
Last year e-commerce was on the rise indeed. For instance, turnover of web stores increased by 59% in Christmas shopping season last year as compared to the season of 2002. According to VeriSign online sales from November 1 till December 31 made up $6,4 billion up from only $4 billion in 2002.
However, VeriSign counted that number of hacker attacks increased by 176% for the same time. The research covers all attacks logged by corporate firewalls and special security systems. To all appearances, VeriSign accounts any irregular access to server including end-to-end ports scanning and attempts to access open disk through port 137. Such requests come to all computers connected to the Internet each several minutes. Such access actually cannot be unambiguously identified as an "attack". USA is leading in the top countries by general number of Internet crimes because the majority of web shops is located there. Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana and Israel are in the top by parameter "relation of dirty to total number of transactions". In 2003, web stores regarded 7% of all orders from the Internet to be "high-risk" and refused to process them. Most of high-risk orders were denied because customers input incorrect credit card numbers or due to suspicions of identity theft. As transaction blocking is carried out by automated systems, it is obvious that these systems worked incorrectly and online traders lost certain profits.
Mr. Ken Silva, the Vice President of VeriSign advised web stores to necessarily use qualified services of security experts and to organize their own corporate security services that would watch firewall and suspicious network activity twenty-four hours a day. As experience has shown even well protected network is easily vulnerable if it is not watched.
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| 2004-03-18 00:41:29 - Niiicceeee. Killawon |
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