By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Forget blocking pornography and fighting off hackers, small businesses should be worried about professional cyber criminals. According to a report issued by Deloitte, cybercrime is one of the biggest cyber security threats we will face in the coming years.

The 2010 CSO CyberSecurity Watch Survey asked 523 professionals, including CEOs, IT people, and law enforcement, and found that cybercrime is a much larger threat than the heads of companies realize. Only one-fifth of those surveyed thought their system was secure. And a third of them think security is suffering because of recent budget cuts. According to the report:

“Stealth techniques enable cyber criminals to act without fear of timely detection, let alone capture and successful prosecution. It is one of the most insidious — and profitable — of crimes, and can be conducted from a well-equipped workstation, perhaps within your own organization.”

The report goes on to say: “An underground economy has evolved around stealing, packaging, and reselling information. Malware authors and other cyber criminals for hire provide skills, capabilities, products, and ‘outsourced’ services to cyber criminals.”

Modern security systems are designed to react to threats, not to organized crime like this. And criminals know this. The criminals take advantage of this weakness by using more advanced attacks such as botnets (bots that are run on thousands of computers by a single master), identification theft, and keystroke identification, to steal valuable information.

Businesses not only pay for an attack through compromised security, but cyber attacks actually cost businesses $6 million a day (fortunately paid for by insurance companies). Cyber criminals don’t discriminate and the recession has made it worse. They go after small businesses too. Not only can they retrieve customer information, they can get financial information. And recently, the attacks have become more targeted.

Internet Crime Complaint Center, an organization set up by the FBI and The National White Collar Crime department, has reported a  33 percent rise in crimes from 2008 to 2009. But only one in seven Internet crimes are reported!

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

According to a July 2009 report from the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), “the biggest incentive to work in a call centre [in India] is to be able to hack the bank accounts and illegally withdraw millions from bank customers.”

Malware on your PC could help bring down foreign or homeland energy utilities and compromise company secrets. Before your computer becomes a zombie, you can protect yourself from some of the more obvious malware threats.

Honestly, after writing this, I feel like some evil bot is watching me right now.

Image: flickr/ Null Value

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