The Web Wide Underworld

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It’s a funny old cyberworld, really, which has taken a decade and more to become what pundits and techies mostly failed to forecast-a simulacrum of the real human world. We talk and gossip, in groups and in pairs, in public and in secret, but now we call it networking. We buy and sell and try to do better business. We follow fashions and trends. We also do the naughty things, as we have always done. Much of this is concealed behind the fascinating facade of the technology that enables it. Consumers and business and government, not to mention the military, have followed the latest must-have gadgetry, from Facebook to the iPhone to remote control of airplanes, operating theatres and virtual private everything in the cloud. Yet what we are actually doing is, more and more simply, an electronic extension of what society has been doing since Neanderthal times – which includes crime.

“Talking to colleagues in the security sector like Sophos and Symantec, the common theme is that the threat is completely relentless and dynamic,” says Dan Turner, CEO of security integrator Vistorm. Formerly CTO, Turner is regarded as one of the technical leaders in the cyber-security community internationally. The UK-based company was acquired by EDS in 2008, which in turn was taken over by HP just a month later. It remains independent in operation, while working closely with HP Labs.

Exponential growth
“We see the threat as increasingly aggressive, growing exponentially and becoming a struggle to contain for even the largest organisations and government. There is no question about the increasing participation of organised crime because we have seen the sophisticated targeting of very specific IP, typically in big corporates and multinationals.”

There is almost a maelstrom of raw malware on the Internet, he says, and in some respects it is acting as a smokescreen for the targeted attacks that are seeking to gain value in some way. “In fact, there is evidence of the criminal side actually working to remove na

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