“Criminals have always been early adopters of … – The Workshop: Accelerating Business

The Criminal today is a perfect playground, online. Geek, he is inspired, consciously or not, of past criminal motives. Interview with Jerome Blanchart, author of “Future Crimes”, published by First Parallel.

The crime would it an eternal beginning?

Phishing, spam, ransomware: connected plagues of recent years are rooted in the past

Jerome Blanchart, deputy editor of the magazine Science & amp;. Junior and historian living from crime, narrates the arcane, in “Crimes of the Future,” published by First Parallel.

Interview originally aired in The Digital Workshop of François Sorel on BFM Business.

the digital revolution in connecting us to each other, leads, can you explain in your book, a new form of crime.

Jérôme Blanchart: If you look a little into history reveals that criminals have always been early adopters of new technologies. I like to draw a parallel with the Bonnot gang. They were among the first to use cars for their robberies. And i ls were pursued by police in bicycle or on horseback. Bonnot was a real geek early. He was mechanic and he had taken care to steal a master of car well. Carburait

Today, criminals have realized that the Internet, networks and others offer new and quite profitable means. They are geeks.

The criminals today use old recipes centuries. And there is a scam that is currently find a second life, that of the Spanish prisoner.

Yes, it’s fun. This is Vidocq who speaks first. In Nice prisons, prisoners wrote to the chain letters – spam before time, shipped to gentlemen, this posing a beautiful captive, held against her will in Spain and begging for release by sending some gold.

You recognize the pattern. This is exactly what is also known in spam, so-called Nigerian scam or so a grieving Russian woman wishing to come to Europe.

The difference is that the ground has been intensified and automated. If the return is low, 0.1% of respondents, the effort is low, too.

Another reason to return is the “money or your life”, ie, the return of the ransom.

Yes, is really what will structure cybercrime. It’s exploding. Basically, the ransomware is based on the question of how to make money with the stolen data.

So far, the conventional method for cybercriminals to steal was blue mass card numbers and then, to associate with other countries’ networks to make payments. It required quite significant infrastructure: the distance of the flight itself, aggregation of these numbers, sale, and then silver production for criminals. It was quite long and complex. Ransomware has really simplified this economic cycle. That is to say that viruses, ransomware is found on your computer. The data is encrypted. We ask you a fairly reasonable amount to decrypt. For the criminal, the data itself is worthless. He has no interest in selling. But it speaks directly to the person for whom they have sentimental value, -. Your personal data, your vacation photos, for example

Bitdefender, a computer security company, conducted a survey , revealing that the French were willing to pay € 190 for the data on their computer. And as for the scam of the prisoner, there is suddenly a real business model. Not only these cybercriminals know the price, neither too high nor too low

And we’re seeing this ransomware model apply to other targets. Businesses, hospitals, police stations. In January, a California hospital whose servers were encrypted has been demanding a ransom of $ 17,000, he paid ransom. Police stations have also made encrypt the United States. In their case, it’s daunting, because either they pay the ransom or they lose the files that allow them to lock up more criminals.

If we remain in the vein Dantesque and police, another case is the police themed ransomware.

Yes, it is quite developed. In 2014, has emerged malware blocking computers and display a window, posing as the National Police, and declaring that you have downloaded files illegally. And therefore have to pay a small fine and not a ransom. In this case, they are banking on the fact that many people download illegal files.

And of course, if you go in prospective, we can expect another cyber crime field, the one who benefit from the development of the Internet of Things, in a connected world.

an American researcher had fun inserting a virus that could spread like an epidemic, to connected cars such they exist today and demonstrated that this virus has the capacity to block 60,000 cars at once.

Jérôme Blanchart, we stop innovating, was stopped Internet? .

no, I have not yet found the solution

from an individual standpoint, I would advocate something simple: do not open n ‘ anything, and be aware that it can happen. Most of these attacks are perpetrated today through people who are not aware of these dangers. It’s the idea of ​​my book. This is a warning, but above all to continue to innovate.