Cyber crime poses threat to e-commerce

NEW YORK, USA: Year 2009 has seen a unprecedented high in the cyber crime which could well mean a very bad news for the future of e-commerce.

Says Michael Fraser, director of the communications law centre at the University of Technology Sydney, "At current trends, in three or four years people will start to think twice about transacting on the Web, individuals and businesses." 

"The way it's trending now, the Web could be so full of rubbish that people won't trust it," Fraser said. "That could destroy the potential of the whole knowledge economy, which so many developed economies are counting on for the competitive advantage."

According to anti virus maker Symantec, 87 percent of e-mail traffic in the past year was spam, compared to just under 70 percent in 2008. More than 40 trillion spam messages were sent according to Symantec, which monitors about a third of the world's e-mail traffic. That's about 5,000 spam messages for every person on the planet.

More of that spam is harboring malicious software, or "malware," -- 2 percent of spam contained malware, a 900 percent increase from the previous year.

The past year saw an explosion of individuals on social networking sites such as Facebook having their accounts compromised and spam being sent to friends within their network.

In this way, cyber criminals have made the attacks more personal because they are sending out messages appropriating victims' names, says Marian Merritt, an Internet safety advisor for Norton, the antivirus brand produced by Symantec. "In the past, people felt annoyed by spam, they didn't really feel a sense of being attacked," Merritt said. "But if your Facebook account is hacked, it's embarrassing."

(Kevin Voigt, CNN)