📸 Photo

French – to assist baffled customers who were trying to install their non-functioning products. Kolberg worked out from trawling through the receipts he also found on the server that the scareware scam had generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the management, in one of the most theatrical examples of Internet crime.

Beyond scareware, there are pump-and-dump schemes, which involve hackers moving into financial sites and digitally inflating share prices, before selling their holdings and then allowing the stock to collapse. There are also payroll schemes, whereby criminals hack into a corporation’s computer and add phantom employees to the personnel database. However, the hackers give these employees real salaries, which are dispatched monthly to so-called ‘money mules’. For a small consideration, these are instructed to pass on the money to a bank far away from where the crime is actually committed.

Just as the Web offers boundless possibilities to the creative mind in the licit world, so criminals can let their fantasies run free on the Internet.

The second major area of malfeasance on the Web is cyber industrial espionage. According to the annual threat report published by the American telecommunications giant, Verizon, this accounts for roughly 34 per cent of criminal activity on the Web and is almost certainly the most lucrative. Communications technology has made the theft of industrial secrets much easier than in the past. Until computers became widespread, stealing material involved physically breaking into a company or, if it were an inside job, finding ways of actually removing and distributing the data being sought.

No such difficulties now: industrial thieves can hack into a corporate system and then sniff around for blueprints, marketing strategies, payrolls or whatever else they are seeking, before downloading it. When Max Vision was not yet the fabled Iceman, he worked across the West Coast as a penetration tester – companies would pay him to attempt a digital break-in. Speaking to me in the orange jumpsuit that is his prison uniform, Vision said, ‘In those years, there was only one company which I failed to break into, and that was a major American pharmaceutical company.’ This is understandable – the value of pharmaceutical companies resides in their research, and the loss of formulae for new treatments can result in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars and the collapse of share prices.