THE LAND OF I KNOW NOT WHAT AND I KNOW NOT WHERE

It is possible that the RBN instigated the attacks on Estonia
but
highly unlikely. More probably it was either paid to launch them or
the authorities leaned on them to participate in this act of patriotism.
This connection between a complex of St Petersburg-based Internet
Service Providers that specialised in criminal activity and the cyber
attack on Estonia highlights one of the greatest conundrums at the
heart of computer crime and computer security.

There are three main ‘threats’ on the Internet, each manifesting them-
selves in a variety of guises. First, there is cybercrime. In its most basic
form, cybercrime consists of ‘carding’, the theft and cloning of credit-
card data for financial gain. Beyond carding, there are all manner of
other scams. One of the most lucrative, for example, is called ‘scare-
ware’, which was perfected by a Ukrainian-based company called Inno-
vative Marketing. IM employed dozens of young people in Kiev, the
Ukrainian capital, most of whom believed they were involved in a
start-up company that was selling legitimate security products. Except
they weren’t.

The company was sending out rogue adware, which, once installed
on an individual’s computer, would trigger a pop-up on the browser
warning the user that their machine had been compromised by a virus.
The only way, the advert explained, to rid their computer of the elec-
tronic critters now crawling all over their hard disk and RAM was to
click on a link and purchase ‘Malware Destroyer 2009’, to name but
one of their countless products.

Once you had downloaded Malware Destroyer (for €40), IM would
instruct you to remove your existing anti-virus system, such as Norton,
and install their product. Once installed, however, it did precisely
nothing – it was an empty piece of software, although now of course
you were open to infection by any passing virus and you had paid for
that dubious privilege.

A researcher for McAfee in Hamburg, Dirk Kolberg, began to monitor
this operation. He followed the scareware back to its source in East Asia
and found that the administrator of IM’s servers had left some ports
wide open, so Kolberg was at liberty to wander into the server and
peruse it at will. What he uncovered was quite breathtaking. Innovative
Marketing was making so much money that it had established three
call centres – one for English speakers, one for German and one for