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Chapter: Security in Computing : Legal and Ethical Issues in Computer Security

Why Computer Criminals Are Hard to Catch

As if computer crime laws and prosecution were not enough, it is also difficult for law enforcement agencies to catch computer criminals. There are two major reasons for this.

Why Computer Criminals Are Hard to Catch

 

As if computer crime laws and prosecution were not enough, it is also difficult for law enforcement agencies to catch computer criminals. There are two major reasons for this.

 

First, computer crime is a multinational activity that must usually be pursued on a national or local level. There are no international laws on computer crime. Even though the major industrial nations cooperate very effectively on tracking computer criminals, criminals know there are "safe havens" from which they cannot be caught. Often, the trail of a criminal stops cold at the boundary of a country. Riptech Inc.

 

[BEL02] studies Internet attack trends by many factors. For the period JanuaryJune 2002 the United States led the world in source of Internet attacks (40 percent) followed by Germany (7 percent). But when you normalize these data for number of users, a very different pattern emerges. Per Internet user, Israel and Hong Kong lead among those nations with more than 1 million users, and Kuwait and Iran top the list among nations with fewer than 1 million users. Nations all over the globe appear on these lists, which demonstrates that attackers can and do operate from many different countries.

 

Complexity is an even more significant factor than country of origin. As we have stated throughout this book, networked attacks are hard to trace and investigate because they can involve so many steps. A smart attacker will "bounce" an attack through many places to obscure the trail. Each step along the way makes the investigator complete more legal steps. If the trail leads from server A to B to C, the law enforcement investigators need a search warrant for data at A, and others for B and C. Even after obtaining the search warrants, the investigator has to find the right administrator and serve the warrants to begin obtaining data. In the time the investigator has to get and serve warrants, not to mention follow leads and correlate findings, the attacker has carefully erased the digital evidence.

 

In a CNET News article, Sandoval [SAN02] says law enforcement agencies are rarely able to track down hackers sophisticated enough to pull off complicated attacks. Sandoval quotes Richard Power, editorial director of the Computer Security Institute: "It's a world class business." Independent investigator Dan Clements says, "only about 10 percent of active hackers are savvy enough to work this way consistently, but they are almost always successful."


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