We are in a golden age for cybercrime, according to Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder and CEO of Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab.
The financial returns, high demand for cybercriminal services, the low risk and the relative simplicity mean the digital world is under attack on a scale never before seen, Kaspersky outlined at his firm’s Security Analyst Summit held in Spain.
"Cyber attacks are simply part of the digital world," he said. "We’re calling the last five years or so the golden age of cybercrime because there are so many criminals and attacks. They have lots of cash, expensive cars, nice properties. Know that from the arrests that have been made and from the news and our links in police departments."
"I hope this year will be the end of the golden age of cybercrime. The police are very angry now, with Spanish police website down, Malaysian government site down and the CIA sites hit," Kaspersky added.
Another fillip for cybercriminals has been the lack of coordination between national governments on a unified approach to cybercrime, Kaspersky said. "Cyber police are limited by national borders; they want to coordinate but there are many bureaucratic procedures in place," he told the Summit. "If [cyber police] want to investigate with cyber police from another country they have to send an official letter, which then gets sent around various people. It doesn’t work."
This means cybercriminals are operating in a world without borders, Eugene Kaspersky added. But there are some bright spots on the horizon, he said. While it is not possible to completely stop malware it is possible to make cybercrime less profitable and to shorten the life of malware, which will help.
Kaspersky pointed to cloud-based security as a way of stemming cyber attacks. The company’s KLoud platform uses a huge network of computers that are connected to its cloud service. These computers report new threats to the KLoud Security Network, which immediately makes the information available to other computers on the network.
No personal data is collected during this process, Kaspersky pointed out. Instead the system looks at fingerprint information such as URLs and applications accessed. If anything suspicious is detected the KLoud service will instruct other computers not to download the application. This can reduce the life of malware to just minutes rather than hours, Kaspersky claimed.
He mentioned the likes of Symantec (with Quorum), McAfee’s Global Threat Intelligence and Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network as similar offerings in this space and he expects more companies will join the party, with the ultimate goal of producing an industry standard for cloud security.
Check back soon for a CBR podcast with Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky, available on our multimedia site CBRonline.tv.
