“Koobface”: Cybercrime is Both Widespread and Profitable

The latest in a series of reports on cybercrime (“Koobface: Inside a Crime Network”) (2010 Report) from the University of Toronto-based Centre for Global Strategic Studies, features a profitable botnet acting as a parasite on popular social media sites. The malware is called “Koobface”, an anagram of “Facebook”, and its success relies on the users of social media’s readiness to extend trust – and their eagerness to click on links. The unsuspecting are lured into installing malware, enabling widespread click fraud that has earned about $2m in the last year for the cybercriminals. As unsettling as the cybercrime, is this observation in the 2010 Report:

What we found with Koobface gave us pause: clearly cybercrime is profitable, but equally clearly, there is little incentive or even basis for our existing institutions of policing to do much about it.

In an interesting sidelight, as related in the two-page article on the topic in The Globe and Mail, is the disclosure that earlier in 2010 the computer of a large Canadian law firm acting on an international transaction was infiltrated by malware – malware which was traced to the servers of a foreign government – the same foreign government that was opposing the transaction. Follow this link for the newspaper article, “Canada: global cybercop?”, The Globe and Mail, November 13, 2010. Follow this link for the 2010 Report: “Koobface: Inside a Crimeware Network” by Ron Deibert (Director, Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto) and Rafal Rohozinski (CEO, the SecDev Group and Senior Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs) Earlier E-TIPS® mini-articles on this general topic (and the Munk School’s research on the “Ghostnet” network) can be found here and here. Summary by: Richard Potter