DARKMARK

on the case had to attend to their day jobs. He simply didn’t know where to start. Along with the files, there was the software for an MSR206. This device is probably the most important weapon in the arsenal of the credit-card fraudsters, who are known by the generic term ‘carders’. With this, the carder can ‘clone’ a credit card. This means copying all the information on the magnetic strip at the back and pasting it onto a piece of blank white plastic with an empty magnetic strip. The MSR206 is a personal mint.

Dawson also found key logging trojans on the files. These are to the criminal hacker what a jemmy is to the safe-cracker. The early viruses were very different creatures from the key loggers. When viruses first circulated in large numbers in the 1990s, they were designed by adolescents and students, so-called script kiddies, who wanted to demonstrate their prowess as anarchic programmers. Irritatingly, they chose to do this by inconveniencing as many computer users around the world as they could.

Once your computer was infected, it might behave in any number of ways: it could slow down; if you requested one application, say Microsoft Word, an Internet browser might open instead; it would automatically shut the computer down; and, worst of all, it could destroy your files and data. There are tales of authors losing entire manuscripts to some mischievous virus, and of statisticians who saw months of data input being gobbled up in front of their eyes by a naughty digital worm.*

But after the millennium hackers, crackers and criminals began to appreciate that viruses, trojans and worms could be put to more lucrative use. The key logger was born, and it multiplied over the Internet at great speed. Once this little chap nestles inside your computer, its job is to track every stroke of your keyboard. So when you type www.hsbc.co.uk into your browser, it sends that information back to its Creator or Owner, who could be anywhere in the world. If you were then to type in your password as, say, Robinhood, the virus Commander in

* The simplest, albeit incomplete, distinction between viruses, worms and trojans, known collectively as ‘malware’, lies in their method of transmission – viruses through infected email attachments, trojans through downloads, while worms have an ability to self-replicate on a host computer and then use that computer’s communications programs to spread themselves to other machines. But, basically, they all do bad things to your computer.