Just recently, one brumal morning, India woke up to the news that an international syndicate had siphoned out 30 crore from the Indian credit card system, and that all the leading banks had fallen prey to these fraudsters. In a separate incident, last week my old e-mail account randomly sent spam mails to all my contacts. Apart from the effort of trying to figure out how to reset my password, I ended up spending so much time pacifying all the people who received the obscene spams.

Both these incidents have one thing in common; neither the banks nor I knew what hit us until the damage had already been inflicted. Such is the disconcerting nature of cyber crimes, you never know when, or what hits you. What's scarier is that crimes likes these are just the minuscule tip of the iceberg, an iceberg which has burgeoned maliciously not just in India, but all over the globe.

With the rampant invasion of technology, computing has become an inseparable part of our lives; we pay our bills online, check our bank balance, share documents and photos with friends, and even shop online. Smart phones, social networking, cloud computing have reinvented the entire online user experience; these platforms manage almost all of the information on the internet, which is a humungous amount of priceless data. This vast information is what is fueling hackers and feeding the teeming underground cybercrime market. A market which costs the world, an annual price of $388 billion (Source: Norton Antivirus’).

The cybercrime enterprise is such a well-organized and efficient workforce, that it would put to shame some of the world's largest conglomerates. From the kingpin to the executives, recruiters and foot soldiers, all of them are bound together in a complex ecosystem, where the chain of command is well established and there are absolutely no lapses in communication between the different levels of hierarchy.

A study by the security firm Trend Micro, reveals several tantalizing details about the underground market in Russia. The study shows that the market cost for spamming a million e-mail addresses is as little as $10. It shows that Trojans are still very much alive, with hackers in hot pursuit of contact lists, confidential documents, bank account numbers and forum and social networking account credentials. A simple Trojan can be $8, the price increasing as the stake increases: a bank key-intercepting Trojan can cost thousands of dollars. These are just a few examples, the cyber market provides a lot of product-variety to its customers.

All in all, the nature of these crimes is such that there is a certain limit to which our society's cyber patrol can protect us, we have to take certain measures to immunize ourselves, and some of the ways you can help yourself are:

• By not using your credit card at every retail store that you visit. Some of these stores are rigged and your credit card details are divulged as soon as it's swiped there.
• When carrying out an online transaction, use the virtual keypad to enter your card number and other details; you never know when a clandestine key logger got downloaded onto your computer.
• Don't fall for Pop-ups: If an e-mail or pop-up window asks you to enter your username or password, don't do it. Instead, open your browser and go to the site directly.
• Secure your wireless network: Hackers can access data while it’s in transit on an unsecured wireless network. You can keep the hackers out by enabling the firewall on your router and changing the router’s administrator password.
• Install an effective anti-phishing software on your computer especially if you carry out online transactions.

As the internet keeps on growing, and our dependence on it becomes increasingly obstinate, the roots of this newly conjured underground cyber market will grow deeper and deeper, at the expense of victims like us. All we can do is ensure that we encapsulate ourselves inside a sizable, robust cyber fortress and brave up for the storm.

??Image credits: www.trak.in