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Cyber thief on the prowl
Posted By:Hajas On 12/21/2007

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Cyber thief on the prowl

And he wants your online identity. The growing menace
has led to widespread concern.

R.K.Raghavan

These are tricky days for those who are in cyberspace
most of their waking hours but care very little about
security.

Millions of predators are said to hover round the Net
just waiting to steal sensitive information. These
thieves adopt all kinds of stratagems, chief of which
is to pass themselves off as someone else.

This menace, involving plundering of names, pictures
and whole documents such as a passport, credit card,
etc, in order to commit a spectrum of crimes, is now
so much of a worldwide phenomenon that a whole
conference held recently in Courmayeur (Mont Blanc,
Italy) was devoted to it. Organised by the
International Scientific and Professional Advisory
Council (ISPAC) of the United Nations, the meet
attracted experts from wide-ranging disciplines and
professions. These included policemen, forensic
scientists, judges, academics and researchers.

The delegates were told that stolen identity documents
were used mainly to procure cash, conceal one’s
identity when fleeing from law, applying for loans to
buy vehicles, obtain cell-phones and services and gain
government benefits. In the US alone, there were
nearly 9 million adult victims of identity fraud
during 2006. I wish we had similar figures for India!

Although the focus was on how identities were stolen
online, there were references also to organised crime
such as human trafficking that is committed in the
conventional way without the use of computers.

The consensus on the occasion was that the problem was
real, huge in terms of the volume of crime it spawned,
intricate (because attacks were sometimes sponsored by
the State or those close to it) and multidimensional,
requiring handling on a war footing. This was
especially in the context of the exponential growth of
e-commerce and Internet-banking that we are now
witness to. The repeated message at the meeting was
that international cooperation was of the essence if
even marginal success against identity theft was to be
achieved.

Alert against ‘Phishing’

Naturally, ‘Phishing’ was a term that was used rather
liberally by all speakers at the Courmayeur
conference. Deceptive Web sites that mimic real ones
belonging to financial institutions, no doubt, cause
enormous economic loss. We must remember that these
undeniably lead to an erosion in public faith over the
ability of these institutions to protect information
and, therefore, customer interests.

While awareness through systematic education has
helped somewhat to stem the rot, what is causing alarm
is the unabated volume of plastic money frauds. No one
can deny that the technology of the underworld has
overtaken the one employed by credit card-issuing
companies. The speed and finesse with which cards can
be duplicated even as you present them to complete
purchase transactions has been overwhelming, even to
the best of policemen and banks.

There are simple low-cost devices available in the
market that can, within minutes, skim stored
information from a genuine card with a view to
producing duplicate credit cards. Not surprisingly,
therefore, many companies these days set apart a
percentage of their earnings to write off fraudulent
use of cards, especially at supermarkets and
restaurants.

Attacks on ATMs

Another growing area of criminal deviance are attacks
against ATMs, which have become part and parcel of
modern banking. These are now major targets for
identity thieves. After fraudsters obtain the PIN of
ATM customers through social engineering or subverted
technology, machines have been broken into with
amazing ease.

The volume of such crime is so high that this industry
has developed what is known as a Cognito system to
combat ATM crime. There is also a suggestion that
favours an international directory, which lays down
standards for recording, reporting and researching ATM
crime. This is of great relevance to the banking
industry in our country in the context of the rapid
proliferation of ATMs.

We see occasional press reports of how criminals in
India vandalise machines as also overpower security
guards at such points. Beyond this we do not have
statistics that would highlight the need for making
ATMs less vulnerable to either frauds or physical
attacks.

An interesting form of deception reported by a Chinese
Professor was the rising frauds using text messages
over mobile phones where the caller uses the identity
of established companies. These messages offer
low-price high-quality goods, university degrees,
university entrance examination questions/keys or game
awards. The reach of each message is nearly 10,000
persons. Imagine the impact of this fraud on a
population of more than a billion, of whom there are
at least 60 million mobile users. This type of fraud
is very relevant to us also because of the staggering
growth in the number of mobile phones.

The terrorist angle

A matter of great concern is the increasing resort to
stolen identities by terrorist organisations. These
bodies require their members to travel across
countries for disseminating propaganda, imparting
training or stage spectacular actions. The
intensification of immigration checks, especially
after 9/11, has made such movements extremely
difficult. This is why there is a spurt in the trade
of false passports.

These are genuine passports issued to respectable
citizens from whom documents are stolen by those who
assist terrorists. The passports are ripped apart to
introduce new pictures and otherwise tamper with
essential details to permit a totally new person,
normally a terrorist or any one habituated to
conventional crime, gain entry into a country of
choice. This explains why about 40 countries, such as
the US and the UK, have moved or are in the process of
moving to passports having biometric features,
otherwise known as e-passports. This is only at a
discussion stage in India.

While initially the face was the only part of the body
that was the base for biometrics, later fingerprints
also came to be employed. An e-passport basically
carries a chip that stores both bio data and a photo
of the individual to whom it is issued. Validation at
an immigration point is through a passport reader that
can locate any mismatch between what is on the chip
when a passport is presented to the immigration and
what was on it before.

How fraud-proof this document is, only time can tell!
Since the data on the chip is digitally signed, an
e-passport is believed to be a major challenge to the
criminal trying to misuse it.

UN group of experts

The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations
has appointed a Group of Experts to study the problem
of falsification of identity for dishonest purposes.
The Group has already submitted a report that is under
examination by the Crime Commission of the UN based in
Vienna. The Courmayeur conference was briefed on the
findings of the group and its recommendations, whose
focus was on enhanced security for passports and other
travel-related identity documents, and the creation of
special law enforcement staff trained in the area.

What is encouraging is the availability of private
research bodies that deem it worth their while to
experiment with new methods to investigate and
identify groups indulging in identity theft. A
non-profit organisation that was represented at
Courmayeur, Cymru of Boston, claims it watches the Net
all the time to locate the illegal goings-on. Its
tally is about 12,000 distinct malware samples every
day.

According to Cymru, the ‘digital shopping mall’ that
assists fraudsters is engaged in the sale of malware,
bots, passports, birth certificates, and similar
merchandise.

Cymru helps organisations subjected to a cyber attack
to identify the source from which it was launched,
provided the complaint is lodged with them within days
of the attack.

Availability of this capability should excite cyber
crime investigators groping in the dark. Alongside
this there is a need to strengthen the law that can
effectively detect and neutralise identity thieves.
The proposed amendment to the Indian Penal Code (IPC)
to introduce a new offence called ‘Identity Theft” is,
therefore, a welcome move.

The writer is a former CBI Director who is currently
Adviser (Security) to TCS Ltd.



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