Saturday, June 3, 2006

Police will not Pursue Ransom Hackers

This is a very interesting article over at ZDNet UK -

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) will not be pursuing the criminals who used a Trojan horse program to lock a Manchester woman's files and demanded a ransom to release them.

The malicious Archiveus program was unintentionally downloaded by Helen Barrow of Rochdale, who found it locked her files into a 30-character password-protected folder. A ransom note instructed her to avoid going to the police, and buy pharmaceutical products online to gain the password to release her files.

Barrow did not pay, and managed to recover some data. The police, however, will not be investigating the crime.

"We aren't investigating the incident as it's an Internet crime, and not within the GMP area — technically it's international," a spokeswoman for GMP told ZDNet UK.

"Trying to find who did this it would be a monumental task," a spokeswoman for GMP told Out-Law.com.

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So basically the police are saying that fighting this type of crime would be too hard? I agree that a local area police force is most likely not equipped to deal with the overall international threat....but isn't someone?

There has to be some group in the world that can look into this. If there isn't yet, there really should be. Seriously. Of course I understand the problems with fighting internet-based crime. If we roll over and let them know that we aren't going to do ANYTHING will only drive them to do more of it.

What can we do? International cyber threats are very hard to fight. It has many of the same traits of normal terrorism. People are protected by the country they live in. Protected by people with guns, rooted into a protective culture - almost untouchable. Sometime protected by law even.

The attackers don't have to worry about laws or rules...they can operate without worry. But the protectors have tons of rules, steps to watch.

It is like fighting your own shadow with both hands behind your back....

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