Decoding the rise of the digital mafia

Instead of engaging in real-life crimes like before, new generation criminal gangs are turning to increasingly sophisticated online robberies.

Among the issues discussed by leaders of the world's seven most industrialized countries at the G7 Summit in Japan in late May 2016 was the fight against cybercrime. And experts have warned about the rise of the digital mafia.

Variations of old-style crime

In late April 2016, the American news channel MSN and the Arabic TV channel Al Jazeera jointly discussed the digital mafia. They tried to decipher how cyber thieves are attacking the world's financial structure, as well as to find the reasons behind the growing cyber threat. The main purpose, of course, was to study the effects and future of cyber thieves.

When talking about mafia here, people want to talk about organized crime and it has different names in different regions of the world such as the underworld in the Chinese world, yakuza in Japan, Cosa Nostra or mafia in Italy,... Mafia has always been notorious for its criminal activities such as protection, extortion, using force to resolve disputes over territory, organizing and supervising secret agreements...

In this era of high technology and the Internet, the mafia operates in two forms. One is that they exploit digital technology to carry out their criminal activities. The other is that they do business right on the digital and networked social platforms.

According to Al Jazeera (April 30, 2016), cyber theft has long replaced the traditional concept of robbing banks, which has been ingrained in people's minds with masked robbers or robbers wearing black eye patches like in comics and movies from the old Western era. When the whole world is switching to online financial and banking transactions, digital financial thieves do not need to dig tunnels or drill holes in walls to directly infiltrate and carry away money and gold.

They can carry out bank robberies all over the world with huge sums of money from afar. Over the years, people have been repeatedly shocked by increasingly sophisticated and daring cyberattack methods. It can be said that this is a fierce chase, a thick orange peel with sharp nails between the lock makers and those who try to crack the locks.

Mafia gangs are turning to attacking financial transactions. Photo: INTERNET

Banking data becomes "delicious bait"

One of the most shocking cyber-bank robberies in the world occurred in early 2016. In February 2016, cyber thieves hacked into the Bangladesh Central Bank's network to steal $951 million from the bank's international payment account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (USA).

Although the Bangladesh bank's cybersecurity system was able to stop it, the hackers still managed to steal $81 million and successfully transferred it to several accounts in the Philippines. It was even more remarkable when BAE Systems (UK) revealed that a Vietnamese commercial bank had been attacked by hackers using malware used in the Bangladesh bank robbery.

Experts warn that recently hacked international financial targets, including the US Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of the Philippines (CBP), and the Qatar National Bank (QNB), have all been the subject of high-profile cyber security breaches.

Digital bank robbers sometimes aim not to rob money but to steal data. In the QNB Bank case, they stole hundreds of customer account details including passwords, social media logins, etc., and then published them on a “whistleblower” website.

In fact, in this era of mafia and digital thieves, data has proven to be more valuable than money. There have been cases of millions of bank account information, credit card accounts being stolen. From that information, digital criminals have exploited and converted it into money. There have been a series of cases of theft of sensitive personal data, especially of celebrities. Everyone understands that digital mafia can use this data to blackmail or pressure their victims.

According to 24h News