Cyber-criminals are making prisoners of all of us

One morning recently I received a text saying that I had an outstanding tollway bill and faced further sanctions if it were not paid.

Next came an email ‘alerting’ me to the fact that $6000 had been withdrawn from my account via PayPal, and to click on the following link to confirm or challenge it. 

Finally, I got a phone call where a recorded message asked me to confirm the withdrawal of a considerable sum of money from my ANZ account. 

It was just another morning dealing with the incessant assaults of cyber-crime.

I no longer own or drive a car, I am not an ANZ customer and I could quickly check that nothing had been withdrawn from the accounts I have with my actual bank. However, these irritating interruptions to my day are now routine.

In the wider world we hear of new and ever more sophisticated scams. Cyber-criminals are especially active around the end of the financial year when people file their tax returns, but can pop up at almost any time.

I read recently of a long-running spoofing scam targeting customers of HSBC. The hackers have somehow managed to insert their texts, warning of a suspicious transaction, into a chain of legitimate messages from the bank.

It causes the recipient to panic and call a number that connects them to a fake fraud team. There is even an HSBC on-hold message.

I will not go into the depressing details of how much HSBC customers have lost though this one scam – just to say that it is in the millions.

When every new trick is revealed we get the same routine information: Be aware, frequently change your password, check back with your institution; don’t take offers at face value, block fake callers, the list goes on and on.

Governments say they are constantly trying to shut down bogus websites, only for them to pop up again in a different form – the cyber-criminals always seem to be one jump ahead.  

So it all boils down to us, the long-suffering recipients of this daily outrage, to protect ourselves. We have become prisoners, forced to lock ourselves behind expensive virus and malware protection, while the rogues circle around us, probing for the slightest weakness that will allow them to break in and rob us blind.  

It should not be like this. My generation has lived long enough to remember when it was not — when the sums in our bank accounts were written in a passbook which we could keep safely at home; when our pay at work came round in brown envelopes hand-delivered by a friendly member of the Accounts Department; when we could store our live savings under our mattresses if we wished.

We have been forced to use the internet, and employers insist we have a bank account in which to deposit our earnings. Of course there are advantages — it is more difficult to blow our wages on one drunken night out for a start. For this we are grateful, but it should also be the responsibility of Governments to protect us from the vulnerabilities it involves.

I will not go so far as a friend driven to distraction and raging over the hackers: “We know where they are — send one of these bloody drones and take them out.”

We actually do know where most of them are. According to Chainalysis, which is a blockchain data platform, North Korea is a hotbed of State-sponsored cyber-crime with stolen funds in the billions supporting the regime of Kim Jong-Un.

Russia and China are also in the business of stealing secretes and spreading misinformation and confusion on the web.

When nuclear weapons threatened to turn the world into ashes, Governments acted and sought to limit the threat. Cyber-crime may not present such an obvious danger to civilisation at the moment, but it is a danger nonetheless.

The time has come for the world to come together to face this problem. An international treaty outlawing the cyber-crime with an international ‘police force’ with powers of investigation would be a start.

Countries refusing to sign should be targeted and isolated, their access to the internet curtailed as far as possible.   

There will be plenty of arguments against this and maybe the current fraught international situation makes it impossible, but it should be on the table.

In the meantime we have to be on our guard for every time the phone rings, or the computer is switched on.