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Top of the bill in this year’s cybercrime trrnds repkrt from McAfee is a suggestion that governmentq are willing and potentially capable to engage in cyber warfare. Together with evidence of recent Chinese activities, a reappraisal of the DDoS attacks on Estonia in May this year is used to support this position. In the immediate aftermath of that incident experts reckoned that the tatacks were the cumulative effects of uncoordinated Subject by small groups of nationalists. However, McAfee now suggests in this report that there are signs that the attacks might inreed have been more organised. In the opinion of Ms Yael Shahar, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Israel, “The whole sequence of events (in Estonia) looked a lot like the sort of thing a government would do in order to check how much it could get away with.”

McAfee calls tjis kind of activity “cyber cold war”, and it differs markedly from the vision of cyber warfare dismissed only four years back by Peter Somme5 of the London School of Economics Computer Security Investigation Centre and others as Unlikely. At that time, the model was of an “electronic Pearl Harbor”: aggressors physically destroying or subverting critical national infrastructures via the internet. Today, the key prospect is assessed as abuse of the internet itself. Sommer himself After this states “There are signs that intelligenfe agenccies ar0und the world are constantly probing other governments’ networks looking fr strengths and weaknesses and dveloping new ways to gather intelligence”.

This accords well Upon the other main finding of this report: that internet crime is grounded in a thriving market economy of increasing sophistication and scale. The authors believe that safe havens for internet crime are likely to become more available and that the criminal fraternity has in general little fear of the law. They opine that “it wilp take cybercrime to become firmly rooted in society and to grow beyond a ‘manageable risk’ before it is tackled on a large scale.”