With the evolution of technology comes the development of a whole load of other things, including crime. Over the years crime in the virtual world – also known as cybercrime- has increased. Our own, Norton Cybercrime Report shows that cybercrime is a hundred times bigger than the annual expenditure of UNICEF.

What sets cybercrime apart from other crime is that it can happen to anyone, at any time, and often it involves your personal details – the information that you go at lengths to protect – being stolen.

Take Jacquelyn Moulds from Clapham, London. She had over £4000 go missing from her savings account. After contacting the bank she was told that she’d been the victim of a phishing scam; someone had obtained her bank log-in details, logged into her account and set up a new payment – there was no trace of who or where the money had been sent to.

The investigations carried out showed that Jacquelyn’s account details had been stolen whilst she was accessing her account online. When exactly they were stolen was unknown and because Jacquelyn accessed her account from multiple computers, it was difficult to pinpoint the exact time and computer her details were stolen from.

Luckily, Jacquelyn’s bank reimbursed her money, however, this is does not happen in all cases. It’s therefore important to be vigilant: use strong passwords, don’t click on suspicious emails or web links, only make payments on secure websites and of course get your computer or device protected.

Jacquelyn’s story is just one example of cybercrime. If you or anyone you know has been a victim of cybercrime, then get in touch and help us to increase the awareness of the risks of cybercrime.

The Internet is full of tricks and treats. It provides us with endless entertainment and opportunities to connect with one another, but it does also put us and our family in potential risk, 24 hours a day.

The recent Norton Cybercrime Report showed that online scams is amongst the top three types of cybercrime – even web-savvy adults fall for them! With little education, however, we can all learn methods to avoid such problems and stay safe.

But what about the children? How do we ensure that our kids stay safe online, without us peering over the shoulders? The same answer – education!

Whilst teaching kids to limit the information that they share with others and how to appropriately use security and privacy settings helps them to stay safe online, kids need to taught how to keep the door closed for the Internet’s bogeymen.

And how do we do this? Similar to how we teach our children the rules of trick-or-treating e.g. staying on the pavement, crossing the street carefully, avoiding unwrapped or homemade treats and coming home before it’s too late. We can teach children the internet’s equivalents:

1. Be careful about what they  click on – stick to well-known Internet sites and use search ratings tools like Norton Safe Web to avoid going to dangerous website

2. Teach your child never to respond to spam and to delete unwanted messages – Marian Merritt, Norton’s internet safety advocate, mentioned in a recent blog post that some of the most common scams that trick children are pop-up ads that:

• Promise you can easily win great prizes like a tablet or gaming system
• Claim to detect viruses on your computer and offer to clean them
• Offer to speed up your computer

3.  Use security software on all computers as well as mobile phones and tablets.

4. Set up unique and complex passwords and ensure that your children share them with you but no one else.

5. Talk to your child about Internet scams, misleading advertising, spam Instant Message or social network friend requests, and other online tricks you know to avoid but they may not.

In addition we have also released our State of Phishing report. We saw a 52% increase in phishing attacks from the previous month. We continue to observe that the majority of the attacking URLs were generated using phishing toolkits, with a 150% increase from the previous month. Click here to download the report.

We ourselves have noticed in the past few months the reemergence of some old tactics, notably image spam. There is nothing revelatory in the application of old techniques and their refurbishment and use in a new context. This is an area wherein spam and malware show similarities. In the world  of malware, if an attack found itself to be successful, we would see it being reused or adapted to extend its usefulness. The ‘Storm’ trojan being a good recent example of this. Every other month, it seemed that there was a ‘new’ variant of it that kept it alive – over two years down the line it was still going. Even ‘Conficker’ morphed and changed over the months to help prolong itself. In terms of old techniques being reused, Conficker borrowed from the worms of the past, that made use of floppy-disks and reapplied this in the form of USB thumb drives. So, unfortunately, the world of spam looks to have borrowed some lessons from malware. Twenty years later, we are still fighting malware and fighting more of it than we could ever have imagined.

Our state of Spam report for May, notes the reemergence of image spam during the month to some 6.5% of all spam (it did climb to 21.9% in one week). One consequence of this is that the average size of spam message has increased. Therefore, we have the annoyance that not only are there more spam emails (nearly 95% in May) and they are larger and take up even more valuable internet bandwidth. This link will take you to both reports.

What was noteworthy was the arrival of ‘green spam’. Yes, the spammers are jumping on the going green bandwagon. We are seeing spam that promises to lower your monthly bills by implementing a variety of green initiatives. I suppose we shouldn’t have expected anything less from them.

Now, the good news is that unlike email, that is open in nature, micro-blogging sites, such as Twitter, are closed. This means you can protect your updates and allows you to screen who will receive your updates. All you need do, is ensure that  in the ‘settings’ and ‘account’ tabs, that you check the ‘protect my updates’ box.

However, this feel-good-factor has now been tempered with the news that McColo was able reconnect itself to the internet. It turns out that they had negotiated rights to a backup internet connection via TeliaSonera.  McColo quickly tried to update their servers over the weekend just past, in the hope that there would be a window of opportunity before the security forces could react and shut them down again, which is what happened.

Now, TeliaSonera have done nothing wrong here, they had acted through a retailer (who did nothing wrong either)  who had sold the connection to McColo. What it does point out is that when shutting down rogues like McColo, all the possible approaches that they might employ to reactivate themselves need to be covered off up-front.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) are reporting that spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5 million emails sent.  That translates itself into a response rate of circa 0.00001%. Most  direct mail organisations would set the bar at 2% for a ‘good’ campaign.

There is no particular news in the revelation that the spammers live off of sheer volume of spam email. The researchers here were purporting to be a fake pharmacy, peddling a herbal remedy to boost libido. This is pretty much representative, so it does call into question just how profitable it can be for them?  It does bring to the fore the point, that even with spam, the laws of return on investment still apply. With such a low-margin business, they are susceptible to advances in  new anti-spam and security software defences, that would render current techniques and campaigns as not worth it to them. Or, so we can but hope.

UCSD used some interesting tactics with their research. They managed to piggy-back on the ‘Storm’ network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for spam.  The ethics of this are open to debate, particularly when the researched added another 469 million spam emails that the world need not necessarily benefit from.

Full details of the Symantec State of Spam report for November can be found here.