Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security solutions vendor Sophos, recently stated cyber criminals “are obviously making money from their code, otherwise they would give up the game.” Examining cyber crime through the lens of financial incentives elegantly explains many of today’s trends in cyber crime and may help predict its future.

The dominant trend of late in cyber crime has been the shift from broad based virus laden email attacks to more targeted and stealthy theft of sensitive information. To aid in this theft of information, cyber criminals rely on trojan horse applications because they can run silently and unnoticed by the user and can be used to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers or social security numbers. A cyber criminal can easily profit from distributing malicious trojan horse applications to select users.