Blog #3: Cybercrime

While doing a little bit of in-depth research about cybercrime, I was interested to find Estonia in the title of so many articles. Estonia is the center of European countries to concentrate on threats and fight cybercrime, but the crime still seems to be flourishing, and the punishments for those caught, increasing.

 The most recent article, posted on Wednesday, November 9, 2011, details the arrest of six Estonians and one Russian who have been wreaking havoc on computers since 2007. The individuals could face prison terms anywhere between five to 30 years.

Now, the first thought that passed through my head was how miserable the prison conditions are in that area of Europe. But are their crimes really worth up to 30 years in prison?

Their massive scheme earned them a whopping $14 million and infected an estimated four million computers in over 100 countries, including several NASA computers. But thirty years? That’s a lifetime. How did we let them get away with their massive fraud for more than four years?

 If you ask me, they don’t deserve that severe of a punishment as much as we deserved the consequences we suffered for those years they got away with it. If our technological abilities are that much weaker than that of Estonian hackers, then we deserve to be tortured by their computer viruses.

I understand how dangerous the growing problem of cybercrime is. I understand the delicate information that countries store in computers, information that could lead to their demise if snatched by the wrong hands, but countries need to focus on protection plans that prevent attacks rather than hunting criminals from 2007 to 2011 and then attacking the attacker and jailing them for thirty years.

Technology is developing so rapidly and so inexpensively that nearly everyone has a computer and internet. And anyone with the internet at their fingertips can become a hacker. The funny thing is, we hand out technology so readily but so few people really know how to use it or understand the power they are capable of with the machines in their households.

However, although I believe that the key to protection is prevention, and countries are trying to tackle this approach quickly, I also believe that no matter how prepared we become, there will always be hackers that are smarter, faster and more capable than the government. It’s the consequence we suffer from allowing free and ready internet access to the world.

Which is worse, the threat of cybercrime? Or the regulation of internet access? And is it solely the responsibility of the government to create protection for the public? Or can the public do something more to protect themselves than simply purchasing Norton and not emailing their social security number?

Almost two thirds of all adult web users globally have fallen victim to some sort of cybercrime, according to the 2011 Norton Cybercrime Report. But if you ask me, I’d rather deal with that all day, any day, rather than lose my internet privileges. Of course, I’m also not NASA and don’t have highly secretive information to hide…