Foiling fraudsters in just 10 keystrokes

Mar 25 2010 by John Hill, The Journal

Ground-breaking research in Newcastle aims to throw a spotlight on fraudsters and paedophiles using the internet to cover their tracks. John Hill reports.

The murder of Darlington teenager Ashleigh Hall last year by a serial sex offender she met on social networking site Facebook has stoked concerns about internet grooming, while a report by auditor Pricewaterhouse Coopers has warned cost-saving back office cuts will leave North East businesses open to malware such as Conficker and Clampi.

A KPMG report this year said the North East had the highest levels of serious fraud cases last year outside of London and the South East, with 42 cases involving sums of more than £100,000 out of a UK total of 271.

It was this need to identify and combat the dangers of online activity that led to the formation of the Centre for CyberCrime and Computer Security in July last year, working as an offshoot of the university’s School of Computing Science.

Mr Butler said: “Ramraiding was invented in the North East and crime was very physical in decades past. It is now morphing into dependence on technology.

“If there’s a recession it’s easy for companies to say they just won’t test the systems, but if you lose that data just once or have a member of staff steal it, you’re absolutely stuffed.”

PricewaterhouseCoopers reports that 46% of UK public sector respondents to its Global Economic Crime Survey reported an upturn in economic crime in the last year. It warned that new programmes were infecting systems for longer periods and “giving outsiders a permanent foothold within computer networks”.

Debra Halcrow, PWC’s senior manager and forensic accountant in the North East, said: “We are living through a period of pay freezes and slow economic growth and the recovery may be a long slog. For some, the desire to maintain their living standards can drive them to cross the line into committing fraud.

“Pay rises and rewards will not kick-in for a year or more after any significant economic recovery, so workers’ experiences are unlikely to match news of improvements in share prices or trading conditions.

“Reduced investment in compliance and checking processes makes it easier for fraudsters, both inside and outside organisations, to exploit weaknesses and opportunities. The result for the company can be reputational damage and stiff fines.”

The Government is set to bring in legislation on April 6 that will allow the Information Commissioner’s office to issue fines of up to £500,000 to companies hit by serious breaches of data security.

The CyberCrime centre is keen to educate businesses in ways to help themselves. Phil is a director of iSafely, an internet training programme which advises parents and professionals how to monitor activity and deal with dangers such as fraud and cyber bullying.

The centre’s research director Jeff Yan has also developed a prototype internet monitoring tool called Cyclops, which highlights instances when an item such as a counterfeited company brand is sold on the internet and grades it by threat level. Cyclops provides regular reports to companies concerned about counterfeiting, looks at website coding to determine the site authors and also monitors chatrooms for hacker discussions.

Phil said: “Cyclops came about when former minister for Europe Caroline Flint visited a conference last year at Watson Burton.

“There was a member of the audience there from Rangers football club who said that within the sporting industry there were big concerns about counterfeit merchandise. I went back to Jeff and asked if there was anything we could do about this and he said that actually there was.

“If you’re concerned about someone using your ID online it can monitor that as well, and that’s why companies such as Experian are interested in it.”

Under centre director Aad van Moorsel, the CyberCrime facility is also working on projects such as passwords using pictures, where a picture stored on an iPhone is broken down into a grid and users can gain access by pressing set grid squares. Phil said Newcastle City Council are taking an interest in this approach.

He said: “I think we’ve got an important role to play. A lot of companies and agencies don’t have any research and development capability at all. That’s our strength.

“We’ve got 50 PhD researchers at our disposal from the school of computer science. It’s no good sitting around in academia doing this research. It has to have an impact.”