Source:Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail
It is a crime in progress, a cyber-fraud network that moves with blistering efficiency between servers in England, criminals in Russia and victims around the globe. It is borderless, profitable and almost impossible to stop. It is the digital future of criminality.
From the basement office of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Nart Villeneuve allows one of his computers to become infected with the so-called Koobface malware — a piece of malicious code conceived by a group of hackers in St. Petersburg that essentially takes control of a computer and tricks users into inadvertently clicking on advertising links across the Web, generating revenue for the authors.