Digital Media Buzz > Cybercrime: Tipping the Black Hat

Cybercrime: Tipping the Black Hat

By Rebecca Jacoby

Trying to get credible professionals such as technology executives at Symantec or authors of books like Hacking Wall Street to talk to me about cybercrime and information security is like, well, needing the skills of a Black Hat.

What’s a Black Hat? Sure, it’s wide-brimmed Texas-style headgear, but when talking digitally, it can also refer to “hackers” who specialize in unauthorized attacking of computer systems (including the use of SEO tactics of keyword stuffing, cloaked pages and link farming).

Recently, Black Hat is a registered trademark of an annual highly technical conference that gathers thought leaders and experts in the field of information security. In fact, the Black Hat USA 2009 Conference is being held July 25-30 in Las Vegas. Speakers at the conference say downright scary things like Alessandro Acquisti, who entitles his piece “I Just Found 10 Million SSN’s;” or Datagram (a pseudonym of some character), which talks about “Lockpicking Forensics.” More than 160 talks on such geek-special briefings will be offered and more than 30 training sessions (several sold out) will be held including “Advanced Malware Analysis, The Exploit Laboratory” and “Application Security: For Hackers and Developers.”

For those of us not deep into the mysterious underpinnings of infrastructure and technical neural nets, the subject sessions at this conference seem not only another language but also a mystifying trek through an alternative world. It’s just not something many of us typical users think deeply about beyond a few best practices.

But here’s a tidbit you may not have known — hacking is now a recognized profession. Ethical hacking is not only an accepted industry term, it’s a grandly sophisticated emerging industry.

Like Black Hat USA, ChicagoCon is a conference also devoted to ethical hacking and security training. This year’s conference, a venue noted for training a new crop of security professionals, took place in May and offered eight hacking certification programs.

The industry is quickly trying to meet demand. Consulting firms and software companies are lining up to assist anyone with a computer. Check the web for online training courses and you’ll find more than 120 million entries. Financial firms, banks and hospitals in larger communities require intensive data security.

Just Google “books on cybercrime” and the search finds 333,000 results, “cybercrime movies” turns up 552,000 results. See the trailer,  ”The New Face of Cybercrime” from Fortify Software, with spokespeople talking about software security as a war.

A war? So we bring in the big guns, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. There are whole divisions dedicated to preventing and prosecuting cybercrime.

“The last year has been a tipping point for cyber security,” says Robert Lentz, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Obama administration. “Safeguarding the Internet and the underlying critical information infrastructures has taken center stage as a National imperative.”

Curious about high tech legal issues? There’s lots of information worth reading on the government’s websites including information from the FBI on tips on how to protect yourself and a list of resources.