Understand legal and regulatory issues that pertain to Information security practice transcends borders. Threats can materialize in seconds from across the globe, actors are often difficult to identify, and they may attempt to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information for a variety of purposes.
They range from otherwise-trusted individuals inside organizations to nation-state actors to individual criminals and organized criminal elements. The weaknesses that the threat actors leverage are equally dynamic. Through the use of technical tools, social engineering, and other means, the systems that process and protect information assets are vulnerable because of their broad access, weak technical controls, and the complexity of managing the diverse array of interconnected systems. In many cases, the unique information processed by the systems is of particular value to the attacker. Personally identifiable information can be used for fraud in a variety of forms. The intellectual property of an organization is also a target, where a compromise would allow attackers to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. The information security professional must be aware of the international environment to develop appropriate strategies to protect the information under their control.
Cyber Crimes and Data Breaches
The explosive increase in the number of interconnected systems has created unprecedented opportunities to compromise records and processes using computer-related technology. These cyber crimes are growing not only in number but in severity, and the sheer volume of the information compromised is staggering. The information security practitioner must have a sound, yet current, appreciation for the range of potential criminal acts and actors.
The computer may be the target of the criminal act, or it may simply facilitate a traditional criminal act. Whether the attacks are for profit or notoriety, tools are readily available to enable malicious actors with minimal technical skills to effect great damage to the information environment. Given the constantly improving capabilities of nation-state actors to target information and infrastructure, today’s information security professional is faced with an ever more difficult task of securing their environment from compromise.
Facilitating the Traditional Criminal Act
Criminal behavior is remarkably adaptable to new technologies. Fraud in various forms, extortion, and extortion are only some of the traditional criminal acts that are now leveraging computer technology.
Fraud
According to Black’s Law Dictionary, fraud is defined as “All multifarious means which human ingenuity can devise, and which are resorted to by one individual to get an advantage over another by false suggestions or suppression of the truth. It includes all surprises, tricks, cunning or dissembling, and any unfair way which another is cheated.” While the precise legal definition varies between jurisdictions, there is no doubt that the legal prohibition of fraud goes back to the earliest legal codes.
Individuals are often targeted to give to charities, often taking advantage of real disasters to solicit donations for relief. The scammers often tell their victims that the donation is tax-deductible under the U.S. tax code. The victims are then surprised when their deductions are disallowed and they are expected to pay federal and state tax on the money that they gave to the scammers!
Other forms of fraud include the use of online sales sites to entice a potential car buyer into fronting the money for the purchase of a vehicle, only to be told that the vehicle is “overseas” and must be transported to the United States, a story that gives the thieves the opportunity to disappear. Still others use a form of offering tickets to sold-out sporting events or concerts, with the scam being revealed only when the person tries to use the forged e-tickets at the event.
The technical sophistication of thieves is clearly increasing. According to FBI statistics from 2017, $969 million was “diverted or attempted to be diverted” from real estate transactions in the United States. Thieves either spoof or, in many cases, hack the email systems of legitimate title or escrow companies and provide instructions to potential homebuyers, who send payments to accounts controlled by thieves. This represents a marked increase in attacks from 2016, when only $19 million in such transactions were reported.
With so many different scams and potential victims, it is not surprising that criminals increasingly take advantage of the electronic movement of information to illegally profit.
Fencing Stolen Goods
Stolen goods are often resold online, where it is difficult to track the source of the goods. Most online retailers have strong policies against selling stolen goods, yet billions of dollars in losses were reported by businesses. In the 2017 Organized Retail Crime Report by the National Retail Federation, 57.6 percent of retailers in the United States have recovered property being sold through online auction sites, an increase of 18.8 percent from the previous year.
Turning the goods into cash quickly is of interest to most thieves, and thieves have taken advantage of new services to quickly turn their ill-gotten gains. With an auction site, the auction must close before the money is collected. Other social media sites operate as classified advertisements, allowing the transaction to close as quickly as a buyer is found.
Even faster turnaround is possible through sites that are dedicated to selling used items, and tools allow prospective buyers to set triggers when items of interest become available. In a somewhat ironic twist, online marketplaces are also used by police to sell unclaimed goods recovered from the thieves. Depending on the jurisdiction, many police agencies are allowed to keep all, or a portion, of the revenue to support policing activities.
Traditionally done at police auctions, this new approach simplifies for the lawmen the same problem as it does for thieves—getting rid of the goods!
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Cyber Extortion
Compelling someone to give money or goods or take actions by threatening harm to their person, reputation, or property is illegal in virtually all modern legal systems. Using computer technology has made it easier for criminals to extort from their victims. While extortion takes many forms, the rise in ransomware is a classic example of criminals leveraging technology for their nefarious ends.
Early malware attacked systems by hiding files or threatening to reformat hard drives. With sufficient technical knowledge, repairs could often be implemented without paying the ransom. Later compromises demanded that users send premium-rate SMS messages to receive a code that would stop their machines from displaying pornographic images.
Advances in technology, including the widespread availability of public key cryptography and relatively anonymous methods of receiving payment methods, allowed criminals to construct attacks that increased the effectiveness and profitability of malware. In late 2013, the malware Crypto locker began spreading, encrypting drives, and demanding payment in Bitcoin.
The ease of delivery through email and SMS messaging, along with the relative anonymity afforded to the extortionists, created new opportunities for entire supply chains dedicated to the delivery of malware. Like any other business, specialists have begun to emerge, with some developing the malware, others managing the distribution, still others collecting the ransoms; some even have help desks to assist victims in purchasing bitcoins
in hopes of being able to get back their data.
The technical capabilities of the extortionists increased when a number of exploits developed by the U.S. intelligence agencies were publicly released. These previously unknown compromises provided a vector that allowed the delivery of the malware to vast numbers of systems. The Petya and WannaCry exploits accelerated the impact of ransomware attacks, and one estimate suggests the collective financial impact to business is more than $11 billion, and the market is still growing.
Pornography
Erotic imagery has been around since the first cave-dwellers drew pictures with charcoal smudges. The early adopters of many technologies and industries, including books, photography, motion pictures, and video games, did so precisely to indulge their prurient interests. The widespread availability of pornography and the borderless nature of the Internet combine to make distribution of erotic content to a large audience a simple matter of bandwidth.
The type of content legal available is often regulated by the jurisdiction. More than half of the Interpol member states have laws specifically related to pornography depicting children, commonly referred to as child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The adoption of legislation specifically prohibiting such depictions has been encouraged by a number of international organizations, including the United Nations and the European Commission.
The Internet has significantly changed how illegal pornography is reproduced and disseminated. The perpetrators actively swap images, often encrypted using steganographic or other cryptographic protections. The end result is that the use of nonelectronic means to reproduce and transmit child pornography has been substantially eliminated.
Depending on the jurisdiction, owners of data services can be held accountable for the legal use of their services. In the European Union, the ratification of Electronic Commerce Directive 2000/31/EC caused member states to implement legislation that requires service providers to “act expeditiously to remove or to disable access” when they are made aware of legal content under their control. This was further strengthened by the Combating the Sexual Abuse and Sexual Exploitation of Children and Child Pornography Directive 2011/93/EU, which required member states to remove CSAM material on websites hosted in their countries.
Nevertheless, CSAM material continues to be available, particularly on the “dark web,” where the lack of governmental enforcement has inspired others to take vigilante action. The hacker collective Anonymous has used several techniques to disrupt the flow of CSAM, including a well-publicized distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against 40 child-porn websites in 2011. In 2016, a hacker claiming association with Anonymous took down some 10,000 sites they claimed were hosting such materials.
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