This underlines the increasing consumer confidence in using the Internet for their personal-to-business and business-to-business transactions.

On the other side of the coin, there has been a major increase in online fraud and so-called “identity theft”.  We have probably all received an email purporting to be from a bank, asking us to click on a link contained within the email to visit the bank’s web site.  You are then directed to enter personal information “to ensure that your account is updated and does not expire”.  The site visited is usually a cleverly constructed copy of the real bank’s site and the unsuspecting consumer’s account details are harvested and it will soon be emptied.  (See December 2004 edition on “phising”).

Some in the IT security sector estimate that the incidence of such criminal activity is on a similar trajectory to that of the commerce itself – up! 

It is also clear that organised crime has now become involved in many of the international scams that have been seen in the past 6 months.  As a result, because of the resources available to organised crime, there is a similar increase in the level of sophistication applied to the various scams.  The skills of hacking, virus development and email spamming can now be applied jointly to perpetrate ever-more complex scams on unsuspecting consumers and businesses.

It is true that many of the major viruses that have appeared in the past couple of years have not been developed by organised crime, but the methodologies used by the misguided individuals involved are now almost certainly being employed to develop a network of “sleeping proxies” – infected PCs that will be dormant until required and then used to provide a channel for launching fraud attacks and acting as a screen to protect the perpetrators.

Lack of education and awareness leaves consumers extremely vulnerable and will need to be continually addressed in the coming months and years.

All this sounds very frightening, and in future, it will almost certainly become a much higher profile issue both for large and small businesses, and their consumers.  However, it is not all doom and gloom.  As discussed earlier, many businesses are benefiting significantly from increased e-commerce activity, and this success will inevitably continue.

At the same time, much work has to be done to protect us all from cyber criminal activity and the onus is on government, the IT industry, businesses and consumers to ensure that we are all increasingly aware of what is happening and how to avoid becoming a victim.