If you could sit down and have a face to face open conversation with a cyber criminal what do you think they would tell you? In this fictionalised interview, we attempt to look at cyber crime from their perspective.
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How did it all start?
I can’t say that it was a planned career move or anything like that, in fact quite the opposite. Maybe more a case of ‘right place at the right time?’ But even that sounds wrong. Perhaps myself and the others are just members of the disenfranchised millennials who found that traditional IT work was relatively mundane and our more modern technical skill sets were totally undervalued in the offers of employment we had, so we looked elsewhere.
What you have to remember is that so much of cyber crime goes unreported due to its relatively low value. I mean companies can lose £200 here, £1000 there, it’s not going to bring them down, but the time and effort it will take them to investigate it, report it, is too much for the value of what they have lost. Is this just ‘luck’ on their part? Of course not, it’s designed that way. Our focus is not about stealing £100,000,000 from one company, but a few thousand pounds from a few thousand companies. The beauty of cyber crime is that it scales.
This article was written by Stuart Wilkes on behalf of the National Cyber Skills Centre. To read the whole article, please click this link.
