Old-fashioned vigilance needed to tackle cybercrime

Tributes pour in for young bus driver Manmeet Alisher, who was killed after being set alight at the wheel in Brisbane... Short yet meaningful life bus driver Manmeet Alisher

Kay Bell, Fewer fake IRS agent scam calls following India’s raids. “In a typical week, the BBB says its Scam Tracker receives approximately 200 reports on tax scams. But that number dropped to just 11 reports of this scam during the week after the raids and arrests, nearly a 95 percent decline.”

More than two dozen people - including four in Texas - have been charged in a $300 million fraud scheme that federal authorities say operated from a network of call centers based in India.
Justice Department Charges 61 In India-Based Call Center Scam:

The callers in India, claiming to be officials with the Internal Revenue Service or immigration services, would present those who answered the phone with an ultimatum. Pay us, or we’ll fine you, deport you or arrest you. Their network was expansive, and their work lucrative. Justice Department officials announced charges against 61 people and entities Thursday and said the call center scheme had scammed at least 15,000 victims out of more than $250 million. Dozens of Individuals Indicted in Multimillion-Dollar Indian Call Center Scam Targeting U.S. Victims

Old-fashioned vigilance needed to tackle cybercrime ( The Australian sat down with Telstra’s chief information security officer Mike Burgess and Palo Alto Network’s regional chief security officer Sean Duca to get a picture of the security landscape, the threats and trends; and how prepared organisations are for keeping hackers at bay. Czech (sic) out the transcript. Old-fashioned vigilance needed to tackle cybercrime 

ATO continues to lean on private sector for tax evasion data

National Intelligence Director Says Data Suggests ‘Nonstate Actor’ Was Behind Cyberattack.

Network experts studying the attack are also starting to rule out usual suspects, such as national governments and online blackmailers. That suggests, they said, the attack was another cry for attention by online attack-for-hire services and their customers looking to make a statement.
“All the arrows point away from any sort of political motivation,” which hurts “the nation-state argument,” said Allison Nixon, a researcher at online-security firm Flashpoint. “Of course, you never know until someone’s got handcuffs on them.”
Evidence instead points to the “loosely knit social circle of kids and young adults” who tend to launch similar attacks, Ms. Nixon said. Flashpoint called comments from online groups like WikiLeaks and the New World Hackers that claimed a connection to the attack “dubious.”

Game theory has long been used to apply mathematical "models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers."
However, our world has evolved from great power conflicts to one where many of our major problems are spawned not from monolithic blocks of self-interest, but from a vast array of single entities making highly individual choices: from lone wolf terrorists to corrupt officials, tax evaders, isolated hackers or even armies of botnets and packages of malware.
Game theory needs to catch up and new research by mathematicians, led by Professor Vassili Kolokoltsov at the University of Warwick, has just found the way to do that by giving game theory calculations an enormous army of "agents"... Army of agents to tackle corrupt officials, tax evaders, terrorists

Cyber-crime: on an upward trend 

Treating teen hackers like addicts could curb cybercrime 

Are Aussies ready for the world of cybercrime? We look at the best and worst cases 

Jason Dinesen, I Think the Cloud is More Secure than My Laptop. “…in my opinion, there’s a greater likelihood of someone throwing a rock through my window and stealing my laptop or grabbing files off my desk, or of mugging me while I’m walking back to my car from a client meeting and stealing files from me, than there is of Thomson Reuters being hacked.” 

Review of the Enterprise E-Mail System Acquisition, September 30, 2016. Reference Number: 2016-20-080.
“The IRS purchased subscriptions for an enterprise e-mail system [Microsoft] that, as it turned out, it could not use.