Collaboration Among Cyber Criminals Raises Online Risks at RSA Conference

Computer intruders are learning to play well with others, and that's bad news for the Internet, according to a panel of law enforcement officials and legal experts speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week. Christopher Painter, deputy director of the Justice Department's computer crime section, spoke almost nostalgically of the days when hackers acted "primarily out of intellectual curiosity." Today, he says, cyber outlaws and serious fraud artists are increasingly working in concert, or are one and the same. "What we've seen recently is a coming together of these two groups," said Painter.

Ronald Plesco, counsel to the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, a computer forensics organization established by the FBI and private industry, agreed, and pointed to the trend in recent years of spammers building networks of compromised computers to launder their fraudulent email offerings.

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