Ministry: Crime Rate Doubled in Cyberspace, THE MOSCOW TIMES

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Computer-related crime rates doubled in 2002 from the previous year,causing an estimated $6 billion of damage to Russian Internet users, theInterior Ministry said Friday. The ministry last year registered 6,251 high-tech crimes, mainlyhacking and online theft, said Konstantin Machabeli, deputy head of theInterior Ministry's technology crime department. He did not provide exact statistics for 2001."New technologies develop rapidly so it is no wonder criminals canfigure out ways to take advantage of them quickly," Machabeli said at anews conference. The ministry's high-tech crimes department said its investigationsincluded theft of classified business information, stolen credit card numberssent to online businesses and pirated software. Law enforcement officials believe the actual number of computer crimescould be much higher than the reported cases. Only about 10 percent ofcomputer crimes are officially registered with the police, they say. Many victims are reluctant to report computer crimes because they fearit could damage their business reputations, Machabeli said. To deal with the problem, the high-tech crimes department has hiredcomputer specialists to handle the investigations, which are often toospecialized for most police detectives, he said. Prosecuting high-tech crimes has also become difficult. Evidence isoften only "virtual," and not all computer crimes being committed are spelledout in the law, Machabeli said. Amending criminal legislation to include those crimes would helpprosecutors, he added. Svetlana Novikova, a spokeswoman for Kaspersky Labs, a leading anti-virus software developer, disagreed and said that amending the legislationto toughen the punishment of the crime or to include more types of crimeswould not stop hackers. As the number of Internet users continues to rise, so too will thevariety of computer crimes, Novikova said. Russia is one of many countries where the number of online users hasgrown along with the number of online crimes, she said. Because most Internet users are anonymous, the situation cannot changeuntil there is a way to trace computer hackers , she said. In January, Mobile TeleSystems, or MTS, reported that one of thecompany's databases containing details on about 5 million customers wasbeing sold in CD form for $60 on the black market. The case was one of the most high-profile computer crimes in corporateRussian history. The MTS database contained the clients' names, passport numbers, homeaddresses and telephone numbers, individual tax numbers and other personaldetails, the mobile-phone company said. The case is still unsolved despite a MTS internal investigation,company spokeswoman Yeva Prokofyeva said Friday. "All that is further complicated by the fact that the information onthose CDs could have come from other sources, not just from our database,"Prokofyeva said.

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