I’m old enough to remember fondly the 2000 Bug fad, where the whole IT industry was busy trying to avoid legacy code crashing due to the millennial change. I know retired Assembly programmers who returned from the nursing homes to collect very generous consulting fees, but January 1st 2001 was a quite morning. It had me thinking about IT market memes and the need for marketing guys to hang their banding on.
I’m not sure Y2K was all fad but it had one vital flaw. I was limited in time, well untile Y3K at least. Cyber fad is not.
Like Y2K bug, Cyber crime is all about people. In Y2K you were fighting crappy code that didn’t consider a change is the in the most significant date digit in essence it was a crime of negligence. In Cybercrime you fight malicious code written with criminal intent.
People will keep on being lazy and some proportion of the population will ever be more likely to commit a crime. But in terms of IT resource allocation, Cyber Crime is not limited by date or geography, and because of that it will be a long term venue for crime economy.
In 2012 there was a report on Malware toolbox called Blackshades, which for $40 enabled my grandma to hack into computers. It took 2 years for Law Enforcement Agencies to take the commercial site offline, but still you can get the tools and use them. Great booming economy is born.
In this case it was a shame that FBI and Europol take-down of Blackshades software factory was shortsighted. Police forces should have continued the operation using the code-base to honey trap malicious users.
