German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich recently released the german crime statistics for 2010. It shows a rapid increase of computer- and internet-related crime of over 12% to now nearly 85,000 cases. Especially data theft is becoming a major problem compared to 2009. The speakers and participants of TeleTrusT's information day on "cyber crime", which took place on May 20th in Berlin, discussed the current issues in great length. Lectures about data or identity theft aimed to show how to avoid and prevent such crimes.

Representatives of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Crime Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) as well as IT specialists and lawyers were describing the individuals that commit such crimes. They were able to show that the classical image of the lonely hacker sitting in front of his computer is no longer accurate. In fact, today there rather are highly organised criminals or politically motivated groups that commit highly coordinated attacks against commercial or governmental networks. They have the ressources, technical tools and the know-how to use methods like phishing or to steal orders from single companies, thus causing them high losses. The sheer quantity of malware means big problems for IT security departments on a daily basis. As Holger Mühlbauer, managing director of TeleTrusT, explains: "Mainly, webbased social networks pose a new threat for security officials. They give criminals completely new possibilities to use social engineering (spying on and manipulation of identities)."

In it's periodical series of events titled "TeleTrusT-Informationdays", the IT-Security Association TeleTrusT Deutschland e.V. gives information on current challenges to IT security and provides practice-relevant knowledge. [www.teletrust.de]