Cyber crime - National crisis in SA

Oct 23, 2013 | 5:34 PM |by SAPA

SA has been listed as the sixth most active country for cyber crimes, but insiders believes it to be ranked third behind Russia and China.MacX - Fotolia.com

Head of business crime and forensics at Werksmans, Dave Loxton, says that in the next few years it's estimated that the proceeds from cyber crime would outweigh those from all other forms of white-collar crime combined.

Cyber crime is any crime involving a computer or the internet

Loxton says that South Africa had proven to be a particularly fertile ground for cyber crime due to it being a "lawless society", with cyber crime syndicates knowing that law enforcement was "paper-thin", with the chances of them being arrested and successfully convicted being low.

It was rare that cyber criminals were individuals, but rather syndicates operating almost like businesses. Cyber crime was linked to other illegal activities such as drug running and human trafficking.

Comparing the FBI's cyber crime enforcement to that of the South African police was like comparing "chalk and cheese"

"We are generally dealing with highly intelligent, sophisticated people... it is a national crisis," Loxton said. "The syndicates find it quite easy to operate in South Africa due to a lack of resources."

The government and private sector needed first to recognise that there was a problem and, following that, throw resources into combating cyber crime. Citizens needed to recognise that the threat of cyber crime existed and use common sense.

The government needed to train police and prosecutors to know how to successfully investigate and arrest cyber criminals and to prosecute and explain cyber crime before a judge.

The private sector needed to have the necessary skills in-house to deal with potential threats and implement policies to reduce their exposure.

It was a potential security threat for employees to bring their own devices to work, and this needed to be taken into consideration.

One of the new trends people needed to be aware of was the abuse of social media

Around 600 000 Facebook accounts worldwide were compromised daily, while 1,5 million people became victims of cyber crime daily, broken down to 18 people a second.

"The big concern is that the compromise is taking place due to a lack of common sense," Loxton said.

Using simple passwords based on birthdays, surnames and other information easily available to cyber criminals needed to be avoided, as criminals knew that people chose passwords which were easy to remember. "One needs to have strong, strong passwords," he said.

While people made sure they had internet security and anti-virus software on their computers, they neglected smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices used for social media, business and communication.

Loxton said South Africa's banking sector was "superb", as the major banks had strong internal forensic services. The problem lay with the customers.