Emerging Cybercrime Trends

The issue of cybercrime has received much attention of late, as individual and organizational losses from online crimes frequently reach into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per incident. Computer criminals have begun deploying advanced, distributed techniques, which are increasingly effective and devastating. This chapter describes a number of these techniques and details one particularly prevalent trend: the employment of large networks of compromised computers, or botnets, to conduct a wide variety of online crimes. A typology of botnets is provided, and the supporting infrastructure of botnets and other online crime, including bulletproof hosting providers and money mule networks, are described. The chapter also relates a number of the practical, legal, and ethical challenges experienced by practitioners, law enforcement, and researchers who must deal with these emergent threats.