China’s mobile cyber crime underground…and me on the Beeb

I was on BBC Newsday, a World Service breakfast programme, on Wednesday talking about the Chinese cyber mobile underground story I wrote up for The Reg this week.

It’s based on a Trend Micro report – The Mobile Cybercriminal Underground Market in China – published this week by its Forward Looking Threat Research Team, which reveals once again the sophistication and commercialisation of the underground networks via which cyber criminals trade goods and service.

Although the report itself doesn’t throw up a huge amount of new data it’s interesting to see evidence that such networks exist in China, selling common attack kits like premium service abusers, SMS Forwarder Trojans and spam.

Typically, being broadcast journalism we were kept strictly to 5 minutes of short, sharp soundbursts by the BBC which allowed for little meaningful discussion of the topic besides “what’s the Dark Web”? “How do I get on it?” and Who’s behind these attacks?”. I had a better chat with the researcher the night before.

That said, it’s an important topic to air publically.

Although we didn’t cover this in as much detail as I’d have liked, the real message to listeners of the program – which apparently has among the highest audience numbers on the planet – is to be more vigilant when downloading apps online and make sure they install basic AV on smartphones.

In China, where unregulated third party Android stores are the norm and mobile AV is rare, the cyber criminals have it made.

The only light I can see on the horizon in this part of the world is for the government to follow through with its planned regulation  of the mobile app space. This would force industry to self-regulate and clamp down on malicious apps either pre-loaded onto phones or uploaded to web stores.

The only problem is that any new regulations are also likely to restrict content deemed “offensive” to Beijing – in other words censorship by the back door.