Crime fears as cheap PCs head for Africa

Initiatives such as the OLPC and Classmate could mean an explosion in botnets in the developing world, warn security experts

• Pete Warren
• The Guardian,
• Thursday February 7 2008
• Article history

The OLPC could have the unwanted side effect of fuelling cybercrime in Africa

What if the plans to spread low-cost One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate computers to the developing world work? What if in a few years there are hundreds of millions of them out there? Many might applaud. But among computer security experts, there's growing concern that those scheme could inadvertently lead to a huge increase in computer crime.

Initiatives such as the OLPC and the Classmate are intended to help bridge the digital divide. But security experts warn that there could be an unforeseen negative effect.

"There is the possibility of creating the largest botnet in the world," says Yuval Ben-Ithak of Finjan, a computer security company. This view is borne out by a recent report by F-Secure identifying Africa as one of the emerging cybercrime threats.

A curious game of cat and mouse is being played out on the internet, as high-tech hunters close in on a group of cybercriminals known as the Russian Business Network, or RBN.

In  scenes reminiscent of Cold War hunts for Russian submarines, the chase started a week ago when the RBN - a Russian ISP alleged to be behind much of today's web crime - slipped its internet moorings in the Baltic coastal city of St Petersburg and made for servers in China.

Peter Warren

Sunday 22 July, 2007

Sunday Express

Peter Warren
Thursday July 19, 2007
The Guardian

Despite the increase in online fraud, enforcement of the law is a mess since the dissolution of the specialist agency set up to fight it, says Pete Warren

Thursday July 5, 2007
The Guardian

Article published in Guardian 15th February, 2007 under headline

'Hackers target the home front' 

One of the UK's leading banks has been forced to admit that organised hacking gangs have been targeting its executives. For the past year, Royal Bank of Scotland has been fighting systematic attempts to break into its computer systems from hackers who have sent personalised emails containing keyloggers to its senior management. This has included executives up to board level and is now the subject of a separate investigation by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.