Who Are the Bad Guys and What Do They Want?

Who Are the Bad Guys?

Cyber Crime Has Many Faces; Understanding Risk is Critical to Implementing Effective Defensive Strategies

In the 1937 movie Pépé le Moko, the title character is a Parisian gangster hiding in the Casbah, a “city within a city” in Algiers. For Pépé, the Casbah offers many advantages. Its narrow winding streets look eerily similar, making it difficult for his pursuers to find him. The streets have no names and his pursuers have no accurate maps, a situation that Pépé exploits to elude capture.

Pépé’s strategy has become the model for modern cyber criminals. Sometimes their Casbahs are real places, such as Ukraine or Taiwan. Many hide in the Dark Net or behind vast robot networks of hacked computers loaded with malware.

Sometimes, they hide right under our noses: a coworker at a nearby desk, a high school student, or just some random person with a laptop at the local coffee shop. Although most cyber crime is intentional, it’s often committed accidentally. Clicking on what appears to be an innocuous link in an email from a friend or simply failing to exercise good password discipline can open doors for cyber criminals and their associates.

Cyber crime and cyber espionage cost the global economy between $375 billion and about $575 billion annually, according to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. As noted in a Washington Post article, that’s far less than the estimates offered by some politicians, but ...