The world of Tony Soprano came to an end with Sunday’s final episode of “The Sopranos.” Over seven years, the award-winning HBO TV series offered insight into the business of the modern Mafia, albeit based on a fictional crime family in New Jersey. We got glimpses of garbage contracts, construction scams, protection rackets, illegal gambling, truck hijacking and credit-card fraud.
But missing from the list of criminal enterprises is cybercrime.
Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, is a face-to-face communicator, someone who is wary of wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. He isn’t a laptop user and he didn’t appear to cash in on the myriad ways to get rich from Internet-related scams.
Richard Stiennon, chief marketing officer at security firm Fortinet, says this is where “The Sopranos” falls short in its depiction of modern organized crime.
“Here they are beating people up with baseball bats, and a lot of the criminals have moved online,” Stiennon said. “The opportunity has been growing with the growth of the Internet. Cybercriminals are looking to expand. They need an organization to exploit those opportunities. It’s like organized crime 2.0.”
Stiennon worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he was a “white hat” hacker. He would break into corporate networks to tell companies where their vulnerabilities were. Now, at Fortinet, he has been giving talks on how much money is flowing through the illegal crime networks online.
“Some like to take the attitude that this is all vendor hype,” he said. “The problem is there is so little revelation of actual attacks. Companies like to stay out of the news, even when they’re attacked.”
But others I’ve interviewed are raising the same alarms about organized crime. Like the Mafia depicted on the show, cybercrime has evolved over the past seven years from “script kiddies,” or young kids who used automated programs to create “cyber graffiti,” to organized efforts aimed at stealing a lot of money.
Michelle Dennedy, chief privacy officer at Sun Microsystems, said that in the past couple of years, the FBI and Secret Service have been warning that they’re encountering much more organized crime activity in cyberspace.
“Stealing identities is the new bank job,” she said.
Christian Desilets, research attorney for the National White Collar Crime Center, said the “Tony Soprano types” may indeed be missing out on e-crime. But he added, “We do see them in offshore betting, but not as much in electronic crimes. But the electronic criminals are organized. There are very sophisticated operations linked to the Russian Mafia.”
In its annual report on organized crime and the Internet, McAfee said new criminal organizations are emerging to prey on Internet users and they’re becoming more sophisticated and scoring bigger paydays.
One study cited by McAfee said banks lost $2 billion last year through illegal access to online bank accounts. In 2005, the FBI estimated computer crimes cost U.S. corporations $67 billion. With such stakes, you can bet most organized criminals are involved.
Dean Takahashi covers technology for the San Jose Mercury News. Reach him at dtakahashi@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5739.
