Duped Facebook friend thought it was 'the real deal'

When a distressed friend asked for help after an overseas trip turned into a nightmare, a Kalgoorlie man was only too willing to pitch in.

But little did he know the $1000 he wired to Natasha Cann was in fact going to a professional cyber fraudster, who had hacked into her Facebook account and was proceeding to dupe all her friends into handing over their cash.

The man, who did not wish to be named, told WAtoday.com.au he was concerned after his friend Natasha told him she was in the United Kingdom and had just been robbed at gunpoint. She also said all her belongings - except her passport - had been stolen.

He said he had never met Natasha in person, but they had developed a friendship by phone and over email through their work dealings in the mining industry.

The man was speaking to her on Facebook chat, when "Natasha" told him about her overseas nightmare and asked him to send her $1000. "She asked me if I could help, I was like 'yeah no worries', and she needed some money to fix her hotel bill and to get back to Australia."

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Online criminals take on the trappings of business

Can you believe it? Service Level Agreements for software written specifically for criminal purposes? Welcome to cybercrime in the Web 2.0 world.

“It’s an ecosystem,” says Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro. “People have defined functions within that system.”

He says he has been criticised for using terms such as malware-as-a-service – malware being malicious software. “But the business has become as mature as that. The latest viruses are extremely well written and coded, even incorporating up-to-the-minute bug fixes in the encryption technology.”

Security experts are agreed that the nature of cybercrime has changed over the years. There have been three phases, says Greg Day, analyst with the security group, McAfee.

The first was the heyday of the amateur hacker – the writer, for example, of the Melissa virus: “These were stereotypical, sat-in-the-bedroom types doing it to prove they were very smart.” In the second phase, criminally minded hackers used their skills to commit cybercrimes on their own account.

In the third and current phase, professional criminals have moved in en masse and malware writers are adopting a lower profile, selling their products over the internet, rather than exposing themselves to legal sanctions.

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