One of the UK’s leading anti-terrorist experts has warned of a criminal exodus from the high-street onto the internet.
Speaking in an interview with Future Intelligence’s Melissa Wills, Chris Phillips, the former head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office and an acknowledged authority on terrorists stressed that criminals now consider technology to be a crucial part of their armoury and claimed the trend would soon become part of terror tactics.
“People that I helped to arrest many years ago were armed robbers that will burgle your house and break into your business in order to steal. Now they do not need to do that…there are new systems where criminals are organising themselves to attack your machines for financial gain,” said Phillips who added.
“Globalisation and innovation has it made it possible for criminals and terrorists to become organised enabling them to create new threats. You don’t really need to blow up Heathrow airport to stop the planes landing. You can just switch the lights off…you can gain access to them using the internet. If you turn the lights off in the terminal building the airport closes.”
Phillips, now the managing director of International Protect & Prepare Security Office (IPPSO) has echoed comments made by John Flatley, the statistician responsible for the British Crime Survey, who revealed in an exclusive interview with the PassW0rd radio programme that the Office of National Statistics were predicting that 20% of the UK population will experience a cyber crime in 2017.
Flatley’s interview, which is available on the Cyber Security Research Institute website, marks a growing official recognition that crime is keeping well abreast of modern technology because of the rich pickings that can be made from fraud and hacking.
“The crime survey has been showing that traditional crimes have been falling for a good part of 20 years, but there has been growing concern that crime has moved online and that it was not being picked up,” said Flatley, who added that it was highly likely that the ONS figures were lower than the actual level of crime due to under-reporting of online crime, embarrassment at being seen to be stupid for falling for an online fraud and because the ONS are still fine-tuning the methods it uses to record the offences.
“When the survey started things like burglary and car crime were of quite high volumes and of quite high concern to the police and policy makers, but those types of crime have fallen dramatically over the last two decades whereas these newer ways of committing crime have really increased.”
This is an official recognition of a trend that cyber security experts have been highlighting for the last 20 years, ironically the same period of time in which the statisticians noted that the figures for traditional crime had been falling.
The problem for the police is that cybercrime has turned into a very attractive option for criminals. The smallest amount that low-level UK cyber fraudsters can expect to claim is around £70,000-£80,000 from operating scams such as selling non-existent goods on E-Bay while ID thieves based in this country can expect to make similar amounts from stealing bank account details. Both crimes that are difficult to detect until they have happened and difficult to investigate once they have.
This is in contrast to the £30,000 or so that can be netted from holding up a building society. A crime that will be vigorously pursued by the police and the possession of a firearm at the time of robbery will result in a sentence of around 20 years. The sentences for cyber-related crime are like the offence itself much more attractive and convicted cyber criminals generally receive a sentence of around two years
“The probability of getting caught is low, the probability of getting convicted is lower and the sentences tend to be lower because courts don’t perceive the amount of harm to be the same. The final factor is how many cybercrimes come to court many don’t,” said Professor Andrew Jones, head of Hertfordshire University’s Cyber Security Centre, and a noted expert on cyber forensics.
For the police an additional factor is that many attacks come from outside of the UK and are often carried out from other countries, or the criminal services that the cyber gangs offer to UK based criminals are routed to other countries.
According to Flatley the work by the ONS has confirmed that the criminal’s awareness of technology far outstrips that of the police and the general public who are being left behind by the high tech crime wave, adding that the crime trend is reflecting the adoption of technology by the public.
With this new generation of tech savvy criminals security is often breached using social engineering techniques to gain access to sensitive information, a tactic most potently demonstrated by the infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick, who frequently convinced people working with in organisations to give him their access details to systems.
Such naivety is often compounded by a lack of technological awareness in the population at large with many people being prepared to click on links in unsolicited emails that allow rogue software to be downloaded onto their machines.
