DARKMARK

French - to assist baffled customers who were trying to install
non-functioning products. Kolberg worked out from trawling through
the receipts he also found on the server that the scareware scam had
generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the management,
in one of the most theatrical examples of Internet crime.

Beyond scareware, there are pump-and-dump schemes, which
involve hackers moving into financial sites and digitally inflating share
prices, before selling their holdings and then allowing the stock to
collapse. There are also payroll schemes, whereby criminals hack into
a corporation's computer and add phantom employees to the personnel
database. However, the hackers give these employees real salaries,
which are dispatched monthly to so-called 'money mules'. For a small
consideration, these are instructed to pass on the money to a bank far
away from where the crime is actually committed.

Just as the Web offers boundless possibilities to the creative mind
in the licit world, so criminals can let their fantasies run free on the
Internet.

The second major area of malfeasance on the Web is cyber industrial
espionage. According to the annual threat report published by the
American telecommunications giant, Verizon, this accounts for roughly
34 per cent of criminal activity on the Web and is almost certainly the
most lucrative. Communications technology has made the theft of
industrial secrets much easier than in the past. Until computers became
widespread, stealing material involved physically breaking into a
company or, if it were an inside job, finding ways of actually removing
and distributing the data being sought.

No such difficulties now: industrial thieves can hack into a corporate
system and then sniff around for blueprints, marketing strategies,
payrolls or whatever else they are seeking, before downloading it. When
Max Vision was not yet the fabled Iceman, he worked across the West
Coast as a penetration tester - companies would pay him to attempt
a digital break-in. Speaking to me in the orange jumpsuit that is his
prison uniform, Vision said, 'In those years, there was only one
company which I failed to break into, and that was a major American
pharmaceutical company.' This is understandable - the value of phar-
maceutical companies resides in their research, and the loss of formulae
for new treatments can result in the loss of hundreds of millions of
dollars and the collapse of share prices.