International Cybercrime: The Good, The Bad & The Internet

The international nature of cybercrime leads to an increasingly interconnected law enforcement world.

By Malcolm Wheatley

September 30, 2004 — CSO — The Good GuysPolice agencies fighting cybercrime must find ways to collaborate across organizational charts and national boundaries

To prevent crime on the streets, you put more officers on the beat. To prevent cybercrime more effectively, you...well, what do you do? Without a beat for cyberofficers to patrol, law enforcement groups have initially responded in reactive mode, dealing with crimes that have already been committed. Deterrence and future crime prevention are still largely addressed by setting examples. That means catching the perpetrators sooner, and levying stiff penalties to show that the law has teeth.

Unfortunately, some countries have only in the past few years enacted any laws against electronic crime. Some have laws, but no effective law enforcement agencies. And many countries (think sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia's more impoverished nations) simply have other priorities. In the world's more violent cities, catching criminals who rob and kill at gunpoint or knifepoint is a higher priority than protecting Western corporations from hackers and malware coders.

But there is some good news; the tide is turning, slowly. Here we profile three organizations that exemplify what can be done to combat the perpetrators of cybercrime. The bottom line: The most effective tool in the fight against cybercriminals isn't fancy equipment or bloated budgets, but cooperation.

London's Metropolitan Police: Computer crime unit forges cooperative links

It's fitting that one of the world's oldest police forces should also be home to one of the first law enforcement agencies dedicated to computer crime. London's Metropolitan Policecolloquially known as Scotland Yardestablished its Computer Crime Unit in 1984. Since then, working cooperatively with both national and international allies, it has dispatched a continual stream of wrongdoers to jail to repent at Her Majesty's pleasure. Or if not repent, at least stay safely behind bars.

For example: 22-year-old Welsh Web designer Simon Vallor was sentenced in January 2003 to two years in prison for infecting 33,000 computers in 42 countries with the Gokar, Admirer and Redesi viruses. The United Kingdom "has strong international links, good laws, and effective police who are aggressive at enforcing those laws," says James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic & International Studies. True to form, Vallor's conviction under Britain's 1990 Computer Misuse Act was aided by one of those strong international links: a tip-off from the FBI.

Another wrongdoer, 18-year-old Exeter University student Joseph McElroy, was lucky to receive a 200-hour community service sentence this February for hacking into 17 computer systems at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Once again, close cooperation between Department of Energy security officials and Computer Crime Unit police in Britain secured the conviction.