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‘Make Internet less of a cyberjungle’

A 24-year-old Romanian cheats a California computer equipment distributor out of $10 million. An Australian teenager causes a release of raw sewage by hacking into a treatment plant’s system. And if you fell for that “free computer game” that spammers promised in 2002, you landed on $4-a-minute porn site, a scam that earned the criminals $11 million, says Roderic Broadhurst of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Criminology.

At a three-day conference that ended Friday, hundreds of experts painted a scary picture of a fast-expanding cyberjungle where many are robbed, see their computers or copyrights violated, or are flooded with racist and other offensive material. The conference focused on the most serious and offensive cyberspace activities, such fraud and hacking, and did not dwell on spammers. But one paper noted that spam, in addition to being a daily nuisance for millions, can also dupe recipients into marketing scams or threaten lives when emergency services computers are inundated with it.

On top of all this is a rising concern that terrorists could go online to spread more than just propaganda. The meeting ended with a plea for governments and the computer industry jointly to make the Internet safer, and for the ratification of a cybercrime convention that would ease international pursuit of cybercriminals. But the cybercriminals have a big head start. The conference heard about the ugly side of the Internet in a report from the 45-nation Council of Europe:

– In Germany in 2003, Internet crimes accounted for only 1.3 percent of all recorded crimes “but for 57 percent – or €6.8 billion ($8.3 billion) – of the material damage caused by crime.”

– A 2004 survey of 494 US corporations found 20 percent had been subject to “attempts of computer sabotage and extortion.”

– Sites promoting racism, hatred and violence have risen by 300 percent since 2000, and Internet child pornography is an industry worth some $20 billion (€16.3 billion) this year.

There were an estimated 600 million Internet users in 2002, double the 1999 number, the report said. In 2006, Broadhurst estimated, China will overtake the United States when 256 million Chinese go into cyberspace.

Terrorist use of the Internet is a growing worry. “My main concern would be a terrorist attack on” computer systems that run power grids, transportation networks, airports and financial institutions, said Ulrich Sieber, head of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany. Traditional law enforcement is often too slow and limited to catch those committing crim es online. Mark Richard, a Department of Justice lawyer at the US mission to the European Union in Brussels, said more problems lie ahead as trans-Atlantic laws often do not dovetail for international pursuit of criminals. US law enforcement is not held back by laws banning the long-term storage of electronic data, unlike Europe where privacy concerns prohibit that.

Nowhere is the law enforcement challenge greater than in online child pornography, whose perpetrators hide images in regular Web sites and prey on chat rooms popular with children, according to Tom Van Renterghem, of Child Focus, the Brussels-based European centre for missing and sexually exploited children. To remedy some of the problems, an alliance of US-based producers of antivirus and other security software said in Washington they will lobby the US Senate to ratify the Council of Europe’s 2001 Cybercrime Convention. “This is an opportunity for the United States to show strong leadership in the area of cybercrime,” said Paul Kurtz, executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a grouping of major software security companies.

Kurtz said the 2001 Council of Europe treaty “assures all nations can respond to criminal activities beyond their boundaries.” The treaty is the first with credible provisions for investigation and prosecution of Internet violators across national boundaries. “It is a truly a unique treaty and must be rapidly implemented,” Mark Richard, a Department of Justice lawyer at the US mission to the European Union in Brussels told the conference.

It lets governments cooperate in prosecuting four types of cybercrime: confidentiality offenses (such as breaking into servers), fraud and forgery, content violations (such as child pornography) and copyright offenses. It provides for joint investigations, extraditions and a global, round-the-clock network to hunt down cybercriminals to prevent them from erasing their “digital footprints.” The Cybercrime Convention has been signed by 30 countries – including Canada, Japan, South Africa and the United States – but is law only the eight that ratified it: Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia and Macedonia. ap

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