A Key Weapon To Thwart Cybercrime

By Alex Salkever
December 3, 2003

While the FBI's Operation Cyber Sweep is necessary and should continue, it's only the first step -- knocking down the low-hanging fruit -- on a long path to better Internet data security.



On Nov. 20 the FBI announced a massive Internet crime bust. Dubbed Operation Cyber Sweep, the investigation netted 125 arrests and indictments over the course of seven weeks. The FBI says those arrested, indicted, and convicted are responsible for $100 million worth of crimes affecting 125,000 Americans and dozens of businesses. The busted ranged from crackpots to the purely craven, including a disgruntled baseball fan who allegedly hacked into the computers of the Philadelphia Phillies and a credit-card scamster charged with using bogus card numbers and bad checks to beat online electronics store Outpost.com out of $80,000 worth of merchandise.
In Operation Cyber Sweep, which is still ongoing, the FBI coordinated actions with dozens of law-enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level. Top FBI officials emphasized that the operation shows how high a priority cybercrime is for bureau investigators, and clearly, the busts bumped the battle up several notches.

Online criminals assume that they can conduct their schemes with impunity, said Attorney General John Ashcroft at a Nov. 20 press conference. Operation Cyber Sweep is proving them wrong, by piercing the criminals' cloak of anonymity and prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.


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