Law enforcement agencies worldwide are losing the battle against cyber crime at a time when criminals are increasingly using the global economic downturn to make headway in recruiting more computers and computer users to further illegal online activities, a scathing new report from security vendor McAfee concludes.
McAfee's annual "Virtual Criminology Report" (PDF) notes that the number of compromised PCs used for blasting out spam and facilitating a host of online scams has quadrupled in the last quarter of 2008 alone, creating armies of spam "zombies" capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages daily.
In an increasing number of cases, those missives are playing on public fears over the battered economy, pitching recipients on too-good-to-be-true job offers aimed to enlist them in cybercrime operations, McAfee said.
"Cybercriminals are cashing in on the fact that the economic downturn is causing people worldwide to increasingly turn to the Web to seek the best deals and jobs, and to manage their finances," the report charges. "They are preying on fear and uncertainty and taking advantage of the fact that consumers are often more easily duped and distracted during times of difficulties. In fact, opportunities to attack are on the rise."
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