Last year, the federal Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 300,000 reports of cyber crime, as it watched Americans lose about $485.3 million to such attacks in 2011 alone. These figures show the rise of cyber crime throughout the nation and underline the need for the U.S. to find ways to prevent it.
Spammers who posted almost half a million Twitter messages in order to silence debate over Russia’s election in December likely purchased fraudulent accounts in bulk and posted the tweets from botnets, groups of malware-infected computers under the command of a single person. According to Networking Group researchers, the campaign took advantage of an underground economy based on spam, a phenomenon that researchers are studying in an attempt to improve methods of eliminating spam.