2008 Woodie Awards
Taking a byte out of cybercrime
Jane S. Hill ; The Dallas Morning News
Issue date: 4/13/05 Section: News
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DALLAS--In December, a man was sentenced for conspiring to steal customers' credit card numbers by hacking into the nationwide computer system used by Lowe's Cos., according to a Department of Justice statement.
The U.S. Attorney credited two FBI special agents with leading the investigation that led to the prosecution and conviction, but there's always a long list of unnamed heroes who made it possible.
No single law enforcement agency will ever have the resources to beat the attackers, said Andrew Macpherson, assistant research professor in the Justiceworks Program at University of New Hampshire.
Instead, fighting cybercrime requires sharing information among citizens, executives, law enforcement officers and academic researchers, to name a few, he said.
While forensics experts dust for cyberfingerprints at the crime scene, others, such as Bhavani Thuraisingham, are on the offensive. As head of the CyberSecurity Research Center at the University of Texas at Dallas and a professor of computer science, Thuraisingham is developing techniques to prevent cybercrime.
Designing safe systems requires a strong understanding of the underlying technology, she said, but it also "helps to understand the mind of a criminal." But most computer scientists don't have that kind of training, so UT Dallas computer specialists are turning to researchers in the business school and social sciences.
"If you don't understand the mind of an attacker, you may come up with some good solutions, but there may not be a real need for them," she said.
In particular, Thuraisingham is interested in securing the Semantic Web, a technology that's still a few years from reality.
Whereas today we read content on the Web and then decide what to do with it, in the future, computer programs will "understand Web pages," recognize words or terms, process the information, and make decisions or carry out sophisticated tasks for you.
But an "intelligent" Web opens the door to security problems, she explained, such as "malicious processes" in the system. These include allowing unauthorized users access to data or doing something completely different with the data than was intended.