Approach with caution

Your computer is your friend, your facilitator, your entertainer, informant and late-night chum, right? Well, not quite, not any more. Cyberspace is, according to new research and new figures, one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Out there in binary, there's a growing possibility that you will be stalked, abused, or have your entire identity stolen. The impersonation may be so flawless that the cyber-crims are able to plunder your bank and credit-card accounts at will; the stalkers could know the most intimate details about you without even having met you.

Out there, the most secretive governments and corporations are powerless to stop their most sensitive information networks being accessed. Even street crime is crackling through cyberspace; the newest form of graffiti is an invisible floating digital 'message' that pops up electronically on your mobile as you pass the spot where it was 'tagged'. And the moment you switch on your computer, phone or Palm Pilot, you instantly become a potential victim of this brave new world of virtual crime.

Until now, cyber-crime stories have tended to centre on hackers, those Robin Hood-esque figures - preferably photogenic post-teens, as incarnated in the eponymous movie starring Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie - who smash-and-grab their way into secret-service or Pentagon files, or access Bill Gates's passwords and send him one-click packages of hard-core porn as a jolly jape. However, a recent flood of stories has emphasised that the colossal amount of personal information floating around computer and digital networks like so much cyberspace junk means it's not just the rich, powerful and famous who are considered fair game. 'Everyone's affected by all aspects of cyber-crime,' says Winn Schwartau, a computer security consultant in the US. 'If you haven't yet been a victim, you will be.'

Schwartau - whose books include CyberShock and Internet & Computer Ethics For Kids, and who's lectured at the FBI and testified before Congress about such modern-day menaces as hackers, phreakers (those who tap into phone networks and intercept messages), viruses, spam (unsolicited electronic mail) and privacy - identifies two particular areas of concern: identity theft and online stalking.

The former is the fastest-growing form of financial fraud in the UK. Cifas, the Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System, reported 18,000 victims of impersonation last year, a rise of 455 per cent on the previous year.

The most notorious case of identity theft involves Abraham Abdallah, a Brooklyn dishwasher, who was recently charged with fraudulently impersonating Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner and George Soros. By logging onto the internet at his local library and using fake mobile-phone accounts and identities, he scammed the credit-card numbers, bank codes and brokerage-account details of more than half of those on Forbes' Magazine's list of America's 400 richest people, persuading banks to transfer millions of dollars into his account. It took cyber-crime 'tecs two months to trace Abdallah, through a blizzard of e-mail addresses and rented postboxes set up in the names of his victims.

But there may be richer pickings to be had at the less exalted end of the spectrum. It's not difficult to circumvent security checks; after all, company directors' names, addresses and dates of birth are all stored at Companies House - accessed online for a small fee - while details of mortgage lenders are available from local property registers, and even mothers' maiden names can be gleaned in the births, marriages and deaths registry. And credit-card numbers? Well, just stop and think for a moment; how many times, today alone, have you given yours out in person, over the phone, or over the web?

'People should be very, very worried,' stresses Schwartau. 'If you're an average middle-class individual, making an average middle-class amount of money, and you have decent credit, you're a target.' In fact, he says, credit-card numbers are the least of your worries: 'There's more danger of someone lifting your numbers when you pay for something in a pub or greasy spoon than over the internet, and anyway, credit-card companies will give you a refund if you have been defrauded. It is when you start to give out your address or phone number that you lay yourself open to identity theft.

'All that these people need are a few personal details, then they open accounts, get a couple of cards, buy a ton of stuff, disappear, and blammo, you're stuck. Not legally, but you're going to have a hell of a time.'

A publisher acquaintance, a recent victim of identity theft, confirms Schwartau's analysis. 'I used to just skim my credit-card statements, but then my card was refused in a restaurant, and when I phoned the company they quoted transactions going out for plane tickets to Germany and hundreds of pounds' worth of clothes, which had put me way over my limit, and which I knew nothing about. I was reimbursed, but now I'm worried about black marks at credit agencies; I'm sure the checks will be more vigorous if I ever want to apply for a loan.'

Cyber-stalking is an equally worrying and insidious form of online crime. It has never been easier to track someone's personal movements, often via the most benign of means. A site like 192.com, the online directory-enquiries service, will furnish you with someone's address and phone number if you simply tap in their name and general locale. Sure, there are safeguards - the person whose details you request can check the e-mail addresses of whoever's been trying to locate them - but an aquaintance of mine, who had developed a slightly unhealthy obsession with a moderately famous writer, got around this simply by accessing his details from someone else's computer. Often, however, the threat can come from closer to home. Schwartau recounts a case of a couple who were bombarded with hate e-mail, going into disturbingly personal detail, over a period of months from a variety of addresses; it turned out to be from the woman's teenage son, who hated his new stepfather.

'There are always going to be ways and means of keeping tabs on someone while covering your tracks,' says Schwartau. 'They were right when they said the internet was an enabling technology. It's enabling for business, and also for criminals and jerks. There's more information out there to access than there's ever been, and there's something fundamentally wrong with that.'

It seems that the powers-that-be, after a sluggish start, are finally making systematic efforts to combat cyber-crime. President Bush's proposed budget, sent to Congress last month, asked that 'additional resources' - thought to be around $2 billion - be allotted to the FBI to fight cyber-crime. In Britain - the number-one target in the Western world for computer criminals - a new police squad, the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, has been formed specifically to counter them. Bill Hughes, Director-General of the National Crime Squad, says he hopes that the Unit, which he describes as a 'milestone' in police work, and which consists of 40 officers based in a 'semi-covert' Central London location, will raise awareness of cyber-crime in this country: 'When businesses say they are not being hacked, they are not telling the truth. Too many people are in denial about this. The Unit will focus on new crimes done with new tools, such as computer cracking, and old crimes done with new tools, such as scams, stalking, and other hate crimes.'

Schwartau, however, thinks this is all too little, too late. 'We've been incredibly slow to respond to what's going on,' he says, 'but changing the mindset is hard. Attack technology is way ahead of defence technology. If you have a house with 24 windows and 13 doors, you have to protect them all, whereas all I have to do is find a crack in one window and I'm in. Fundamental security systems haven't been built into the networks; they're still an afterthought. It'll take another 20 years at least to catch up.'

In the meantime, cyber-crime is taking ever-more-ingenious forms. There's Radio Frequency or Wireless Hacking, regarded as 'hacking's next big thing', where, armed simply with a dorsal-shaped Lucent antenna fixed to a car roof and plugged into a laptop via an ordinary £100 computer wireless card, you can cruise around or sit in a car park picking up company networks via mobile-phone and pager messages, gorging on classified information and emergency access codes much as an earlier generation got its kicks tuning into police radio wavebands. Then there's 'cyber-graffiti', a wireless content application developed by a San Francisco company that will enable your mobile phone or Palm Pilot to 'spray' a digital message in front of a building, to pop up on the phone or PDA of others walking by: 'This place sucks!' in front of a less-than-perfect restaurant, that sort of thing.

Schwartau dismisses this stuff as 'kids' games', but then, he's got bigger e-fish to fry; back in 1990, he was warning the world about the prospect of a 'cyber Pearl Harbour'. The term has since been picked up by CIA director John Deutsch and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who described the mooted threat as 'a cyber attack of national proportions resulting in mass disruption of our society and of our lives'. This isn't scaremongering, insists Schwartau. 'I think it's a real possibility. It'll be an organised, well-financed, highly motivated effort to target the economy or the heart of government, with hackers and insiders in critical positions, maybe combined with physical attacks, and it could come from extremists who think they have a higher cause, whether religious, political, social, environmental, whatever; either end of the spectrum.'

It's a long way from complete societal breakdown to wondering if you should give your MasterCard number over the net to buy the new S Club 7 CD, but it all helps to explain the internet paranoia at both transcendent and mundane levels; some of the recent high-profile e-tailing casualties can be accounted for by the fact that, in a recent Harris Interactive survey, six out of ten respondents said that they avoided shopping in web stores because they were afraid of giving out their details online.

However, Schwartau insists, there are things you can do to ensure safer surfing. You can build a free personal 'firewall' - a blocking device which should protect you from exposure to unsecured sites - at sites like webattack.com. You can also go to sites like grc.com to test your own security; click on 'Shields UPI' and it'll tell you where you're secure and where you're weak.

There are other practical steps to take. 'Make sure you have an anti-virus package that you update at least once a week,' says Schwartau. 'And if you receive attachments from people, check before opening them. And if you get an e-mail from someone you don't know, with an .exe file attachment, delete it. Security,' he intones, 'is a people problem.'

But isn't the real problem that the internet, for the unwary, is just like a secondhand sieve - full of holes of one size or another through which your most intimate details plunge straight into the grasping arms of the most ruthless cyber-criminals?

'The internet isn't full of holes,' corrects Schwartau. 'When you connect to the internet, you're full of holes. So it's a self-help thing. Here's the best analogy,' he concludes, with a flourish. 'Before you go to bed at night, don't you check the doors and locks? Well, make sure you do the same thing on your computer. That way, you've done all you can to ensure they can't get in.'