Cybercrime 2.0: When the Cloud Turns Dark

Abstract

As the Web has become vital for day-to-day transactions, it has also become an attractive avenue for cybercrime. Financially motivated, the crime we see on the Web today is quite different from the more traditional network attacks. A few years ago Internet attackers relied heavily on remotely exploiting servers identified by scanning the Internet for vulnerable network services. Autonomously spreading computer worms such as Code Red and SQLSlammer were examples of such scanning attacks. Their huge scale put even the Internet at large at risk; for example, SQLSlammer generated traffic sufficient to melt down backbones.