Internet crime on the rise in Germany

BERLIN, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- Internet crime is on the rise in Germany, according the country's law enforcement authorities.

Have you chosen "12345" or the name of your spouse as your Web password? Are you posting everything you know about yourself on social communities like Facebook or MySpace? Are you announcing your daily habits on Twitter? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then you are at risk of becoming a victim of the increasingly sophisticated Internet criminals.

In Germany, the number of crimes committed via the Web in 2008 has risen by around 11 percent to 37,900, the German Federal Criminal Office, or BKA, said last week.

While product-based fraud still accounts for roughly half of the crimes, the theft of personal data -- credit card information or passwords for e-mail accounts and online banking -- also called phishing, is increasing dramatically.

Dieter Kempf, the head of the German Internet industry group Bitkom, said he expects 2,900 phishing cases for 2009 -- a rise of around 50 percent compared with the previous year.

BKA head Joerg Ziercke said the average amount of damage related to phishing cases is around $6,000, but individual cases carried damage of up to $100,000.

"Phishing is the bank robbery of the digital age," Ziercke said Thursday at a news conference in Berlin.

Criminals collect data via bogus Web sites that ask users to enter their personal data with the help of a so-called Trojan horse, spy software that is secretly installed on the victim's computer. FBI Director Robert Mueller has said he stopped online banking because he nearly fell for a phishing attempt.

You don't even have to open a bogus e-mail attachment to become infected: Simply browsing infected Web sites is enough to get a Trojan. Often, infected computers are linked into so-called botnets, a collection of software robots that run autonomously and automatically. Criminals use botnets to launch coordinated e-mail spam attacks, for example. Police recently discovered a botnet with 1.4 million computers assembled by a man in Ukraine.

"It's a constant race between those who guarantee security and those who try to penetrate it," Kempf said.

Ziercke warned that current laws would not suffice to stop Internet criminals, who often hide behind several bogus servers lined via numerous countries. Tracing the original source is tedious and takes too long, Ziercke said. Often, criminals have long emptied and left behind their servers when law enforcement authorities finally detect them. He indicated that he would urge the new government to boost Internet safety efforts.