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Tech-savvy recruited for organised crime
Students targeted by "bad guys"

By Tom Espiner

Published: Monday 23 June 2008

As organised criminals move from more traditional crimes, such as armed robbery, towards e-crime, there is evidence that they are targeting university students, graduates and the tech savvy for recruitment, according to security experts and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

A Soca spokesperson told silicon.com sister site ZDNet.co.uk on Friday: "We are aware of anecdotal evidence of organised criminals [who are] moving into e-crime targeting people at an academic level."

Security from A to Z

Click on the links below to find out more...

A is for Antivirus
B is for Botnets
C is for CMA
D is for DDoS
E is for Extradition
F is for Federated identity
G is for Google
H is for Hackers
I is for IM
J is for Jaschan (Sven)
K is for Kids
L is for Love Bug
M is for Microsoft
N is for Neologisms
O is for Orange
P is for Passwords
Q is for Questions
R is for Rootkits
S is for Spyware
T is for Two-factor authentication
U is for USB sticks/devices
V is for Virus variants
W is for Wi-fi
X is for OS X
Y is for You
Z is for Zero-day

According to Paul Simmonds, chief information security officer for AstraZeneca, one of the root causes of computer security issues is funding. According to Simmonds, computer criminals are in a far more lucrative trade than security professionals, and are in a position to fund people's computer science courses at university in return for hacking expertise after the course has finished.

Simmonds said: "The root cause of the issue is that the bad guys are better funded than we are. They have research and development programmes, they are putting people through university, they are calculating return on investment and they have better quality assurance. By comparison, the legitimate security industry is under-funded, under-resourced and constantly on the back foot."

Security vendor Trend Micro told ZDNet.co.uk that it has also seen hacker recruitment in universities, including in China.

Eva Chen, chief executive officer of Trend Micro, said: "We do see recruitment in universities - so-called 'companies' recruiting talent for hacking. They call themselves 'consultancy companies'. We've seen them recruiting in China."

Trend Micro's chief technology officer, Raimund Genes, said that security conferences also provide recruitment opportunities for organised criminals.

Genes said: "Yes, they put them through university, and they are clearly recruiting at [security conferences]. Competitions like 'capture the flag' showcase talent. As a forum, there are security specialists, geeks who are not sure whether they want to go to the dark side, and guys [recruiting] who are definitely on the dark side."

Soca said that, while it was "not willing to go into specific detail about which techniques" criminals are using, it was also aware of hacker recruitment at security conferences.

The Soca spokesperson said: "If [organised criminals] need to employ specialist skills, they will go to sources that cover specialist skills."