Europol warns of cybercrime surge

Europol, the European Union’s police agency, said cybercrime is rising, driven by an expansion in the number of criminals working on the internet and a rise in the opportunities for criminal gain.
 
Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre supported 131 successful cyber operations last year, up from 72 operations in 2014, the agency said in a new report.
 
More effort is needed to prioritize cyber investigations and better attribute the cyber tools used in a crime and the people behind the activity, according to the report.
 
Police forces have increased their ability to work together to combat cyber-facilitated crimes, but new tools have created challenges, Rob Wainwright, the executive director of Europol, said Wednesday.
 
Enterprising malware designers provide their tools to a vast criminal network, Mr. Wainwright said. And there is evidence, in some cases, of a forensic trail that can connect cyber criminals with state-sponsored cyber espionage.
 
“What we see at the heart of this is a dynamic, highly enterprising underworld…in which there is a free-flowing marketplace of cybercrime tools,” Mr. Wainwright said. “The providers of the latest malware are providing it to criminals and potentially state actors and potentially eventually terrorists.”
 
While extremists are currently exploiting cyber networks on a limited basis, the report warns that cyber tools could increasingly be tapped by extremist networks seeking firearms and weapons.
 
U.S. and European governments, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have seen an uptick in the number of cyber intruders trying to probe their networks in recent months. U.S. officials have said Russia is behind prominent cyber-attacks on the Democratic National Committee and prominent officials.
 
And in Europe, western officials said the cyber-attacks have become more intense. “It is a constantly growing number of attacks and increasing duration,” said a NATO official.
 
The Europol report identified multiple trends, from growing use of ransomware to payment fraud. The report also said there was growing use of a model where people who create specialist cybercrime tools are connected in the digital underground with organized crime groups. The report raised the specter that terrorists could also begin to tap these cyber tools.
 
Cybercriminals are continuing to expand their use of virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin, for ransom and extortion payments. The report found that cybercriminals are focusing more on attacks on so-called “high-value targets” such as the CEOs of companies.
 
Improved encryption methods have been used across the range of cybercriminal activities.
 
The report singled out the dangers of child abuse and exploitation, noting that people have used end-to-end encryption to live stream child abuse.
 
Russia and Russian-speaking countries maintain the largest marketplaces for the kinds of malware and other tools used by criminal hackers, but the report says Germany is a growing source too.
 
‘While many European countries no doubt have some form of domestic digital underground, Germany is considered by some researchers to have one of the fastest-growing underground markets within the EU, although much of its crimeware products focus only on domestic targets,” the report said.

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