Is it time for Internetpol to manage Internet?

MUMBAI, INDIA: Believe it or not. 2008 was the year that witnessed an ‘explosive’ growth in the amount of malicious software (malware) on the Internet.

According to a report recently published by F-Secure, a provider in security solution for Internet service providers, the amount of malware accumulated over the previous 21 years increased by 200 per cent just in the course of one year.

This year the overall detections count has tripled against 2007 and about 1.5 million signature based detections have been done by F-Secure. And the amount of malicious software, infections, number of botnets, criminal profits naturally calls for actions against the attackers.

Further, malicious sample totals increased by almost 350 percent, where 10 millions of suspicious samples have been imported, scanned, indexed, classified and categorized by F-Secure's Response Lab Systems, says the IT security threat report for 2008. This poses a question as to how could one deal with the issue.

“It can be dealt in two ways, one by minimizing these attacks using technology and two by taking action against the culprits or perpetrators involved in such crimes,” Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's chief research officer (CRO) told CyberMedia News.

“The latter remains more important as it sends message across the board to those perpetrators, gangs or others that they can be punishable and we won't tolerate them.”

However on his first way, Hypponen commented that the tech tools developed by us are also being used by those attackers to write virus or malicious programs hence it doesn't solve the purpose.

“So far not many have been caught or punished by security and government agencies globally due to lack of mechanism or agency like Interpol.We are not police, but we need real police to fight them which are sitting in different countries and operating,” he affirmed.

Interestingly, Hypponen is working with foreign governments and security agencies to set up ‘Internetpol’ (Internet Police) same as ‘Interpol’ to fight cybercrimes. He has already discussed this idea with European Union (EU) security agencies, UK's Scotland Yard, USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and also hopes to do the same with the Indian agencies.

F-Secure's security technologies are based on Threat Analysis Process using the Blacklight – a scan engine for scrutinizing the virus and malware samples. “Our new security solutions – Deep Guard 2.0 is based on cloud approach offering real-time protection network, where the tool examines the applications or computer programs and accordingly blocks malicious programs and only allows the proper ones,” he explained.

In Hypponen's view, the attackers don't keep about any particular region or country while attacking. “Despite India's IT growth, the local computer users lack understanding and awareness on viruses, malwares or threats compared to users in the US, UK and other nations,” he opined.