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Schmidt On Cybercrime
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2006-06-26
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Howard Schmidt believes that cybercrimes are taking place with increasing frequency, and in ways that are increasingly complex. Schmidt, who was a cyber-security adviser to the Bush administration, the former chief information security officer at Microsoft and eBay, and now works for R&H Security Consulting, spoke at an SD forum seminar.
The security expert, as quoted by eWeek, said, "It used to be only burglaries from people's homes and businesses. Those still happen, of course, but now, it's so much more lucrative to break into people's online information and steal someone's identity, that a lot of bad people around the world are spending an awful lot of time learning to do it."
For many reasons, it's only become easier over time to commit cybercrime. "We are connected today like we've never been connected before," Schmidt observed. He then spoke of the Evernet, which eWeek's Chris Preimesberger defines as "the convergence of wireless, broadband and Internet telephony technologies that will result in people's ability to be continuously connected to the Web anywhere using virtually any information device."
"We depend on the Evernet," said Schmidt, "like nothing we have before. And nobody -I repeat - nobody has privacy . . . . It's amazing how much information is available to anybody who really wants to look for it." The security analyst was particularly concerned about how P2P applications can convey personal information. "In one case of this sort, a criminal searched for and found 117,000 medical-record passwords - just by knowing how to search in a P2P app on the Web."
Schmidt placed much of the security burden on developers and the government, saying, "All those users can't do their security all by themselves - they need all the help they can get." But it's our responsibility (and just a good idea, generally speaking) to do the best we can.
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About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews, InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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