On Tuesday, McAfee launched a new film series on cybercrime. Titled "H*Commerce: The Business of Hacking You", the series will be released in six parts, a new part every two weeks. "We produced the Web-based film to make cybercrime real for people, and to help consumers understand why they need to take precautions," said David Milam, McAfee's chief marketing officer, explained.
The episode released on Tuesday sets the stage with commentary from a variety of industry experts, among them Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and John Draper (aka Cap'n Crunch), inventor of phone phreaking. Wozniak suggests that phone phreaks and true hackers have a strong ethic. "You aren't doing this to rip people off or make money," Wozniak said. "You're doing it to explore."
Draper points out that jailing hackers has had the unwanted side-effect of hooking them up with career criminals. "Once I got busted, I had to tell everybody else in jail how to do it," says Draper, "and then the cat's out of the bag. The next thing you know, the mob has this technology." Indeed most security pundits report that hacking and data theft are just like any other organized criminal businesses these days.
Future episodes track a complex scam inflicted on one Janella Spears of Oregon. Over a period of months Spears was tricked out of over $400,000 in a scheme that started with a simple e-mail scam.
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