In order to reduce cybercrime Microsoft has opened a coalition which will work as the clearing house for all reports about cases of data theft all across the internet. Till now there was no medium for security personals to report data theft and the servers which assist the criminals in doing so. This move by Microsoft will definitely be of great help to the entire internet community. Any illegal activity which will take place on the internet will be reported to the Internet Fraud Alert Center and then they will decide whether to suspend the criminals account or not. The Internet Fraud Alert Center will be headed by Microsoft and will work in accordance with National Cyber Forensic & Training Alliance.
Information like stolen bank accounts password, or social security numbers will be saved on servers of NCFTA and will be provided to the law firms as and when needed. According to a report cybercriminals phished around 650 million US dollars last year and this need to be controlled and checked. Cybercriminals routinely scan the compromised computers which they use as storage servers and store small amount of stolen data there. The ne center for Internet Fraud will now regularly keep an eye on these servers and will take appropriate action once a theft gets noticed. One such server recently came into notice by the Fraud center and it contained around 6000 passwords of active bank accounts and around 1200 login id of financial online accounts of 30 banks. The data cached by Internet Fraud Alert Center will not be available in public and will only be provided to the organisation on request. For example if they find some bank account information then it will be given to the bank and then bank will decide how to deal with such situation.
The American Bankers Association, Citizens Bank, Anti-Phishing Working Group, eBay, the National Consumers League, PayPal and The Federal Trade Commission are all a part of Internet Fraud Alert group. Microsoft is foreseeing the involvement of other major companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook which eventually will help making this effort a success and reduce cyber crime. Sites like Google, Yahoo and Facebook contributes to high internet traffic and if this data can be sifted then it will really unveil the malicious activities going on the internet.
Cyber crime actually is increasing day by day and despite new security measures being introduced it still remains functioning. Cyber crime could be anything in which somebody’s personal information is beings stolen. It not necessarily involves money into it but stealing somebody’s email is also a relevant example of cyber crime. Government organisations have been working a lot to find such cases and solve them but with technology evolving day by day it has become very difficult to deal with such situation. With private companies like Microsoft coming into it, it seems that this can be tackled and Cyber crimes can be controlled.
