Alarming Growth of Cyber Crime

It has been observed that technology used by criminals, keeps pace with and more often than not outpaces the progression of science and technology in a society. Criminals have progressed from using blunt weapons, to weapons with sharp edges, to guns, to chemical and biological weapons.

However, in today’s era of digital everything, digital or cyber-crimes are the fastest growing crimes amongst crimes of all type. In fact, their growth rate far surpasses the growth of all legitimate businesses also.

Cyber-crime is growing at an incredibly fast pace, with new technologies and trends constantly emerging every day, to commit cyber-attacks against governments, businesses and individuals. Cyber-criminals are becoming more adept at adopting and exploiting new technologies with lightning speed, customizing their attacks using new methods, and cooperating with each other in ways that the world has not seen before.

Several complex criminal networks operate across the world, that are capable of coordinating sophisticated attacks in a matter of minutes. These crimes know no borders, either physical or virtual, cause serious harm and pose very real threats to victims worldwide.

New phenomena such as DarkNet and cryptocurrencies fuel not only cyber-crime, but enable several other crimes, that have links to terrorism and organized crime.

So popular are cyber-attacks that several nations have adopted them as tools of warfare. Today’s modern weapons are built with highly sophisticated technology that are controlled by command networks. Crippling the command network or taking them over can finish the war very quickly and without any loss of life. Almost all weapons manufacturers offer sophisticated weapons and command centers, that they claim are cyber-secure.

In the same genre as cyber-warfare, is cyber-terror, where terrorists instead of or along with using violent means, attempt at destroying an organization or a country’s economy to achieve their political objectives.

For example, in 2017, the WannaCry and NotPetya cyber-attacks affected organizations in more than 150 countries, prompted business interruption and other losses estimated at well over USD 300 million by some companies, brought reputational damage, and resulted in huge loss of customer data. Findings resulted in attribution of WannaCry attack to hackers backed by North Korea. Similarly, NotPetya was attributed to the Russian hackers.

In summary, cyber-crime is here to stay. Individuals, Businesses and governments need to be vigilant towards their cyber security.