Special report: Cyberwar and the future of cybersecurity (free ebook)
This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature, looks at how today’s security threats have expanded in their scope and seriousness—and how cybersecurity may define international conflicts in the future.
From the ebook:
Criminals are drawn to the internet for as many different reasons as the rest of us. Some of them just want to break things, many want to get rich, and some want to change the world.
Some are lone wolves, some are part of sophisticated criminal gangs and some even work with the tacit approval and support of their governments. But thanks to the borderless nature of the internet you could be unlucky enough to find that some—or all—of these groups could be targeting you at some point.
Just as the rise of the web created new business models and allowed existing firms to sell and communicate globally, so it has also created new types of crime that didn’t exist before and given existing crimes a turbo boost by allowing crooks to perpetrate them from anywhere in the world.
And as the web has grown up over the last three decades the types of cybercrime have changed too. Go back a decade or two and the majority of digital crime was really a form of online vandalism; defacing websites and the like. That still occurs, but much of today’s internet crime is now about getting rich.
As online crime has grown it has also evolved—or mutated—into a set of occasionally overlapping groups that pose distinct threats to organisations of different sizes. These groups have different tools, objectives and specialities, and understanding this can help defend against them.