Mr. Martin is the Chief Financial Officer and Research Fellow for Team Cymru. Additionally, he teaches a graduate course in Network Security Fundamentals at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. The course covers recognizing, preventing, and recovering from cyber attacks. During his final assignment with the United States Air Force, Jerry served as Director, Technical Analysis Branch at the Joint Task Force for Computer Network Operations (JTF-CNO). He has authored papers for a number of senior government officials and has been a presenter at many different forums.

Mr. Martin will discuss THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY. The cyber underground economy is, like its physical counterpart, just as seedy and illegal. The primary objective of those who operate there is money. The National Cyber Security Alliance published some data a while ago that concisely describes the problem: 1) 61% of US computers are infected with spyware. 2) Americans say they lost more than US $336 million last year to online fraud. These figures are largely based on self-reporting, which is often suspect, and therefore the accuracy of them may be skewed. Given the enormous quantity of data witnessed on numerous Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, both numbers may be underreported. Given these staggering numbers, one might ask what is being done to address this criminal activity. Lamentably, not much is the answer. The popular school of thought is that finding and prosecuting these perpetrators of financial fraud and outright theft is too costly, too resource intensive, just too hard. This lecture will expose the infrastructure the miscreants have established; the open arrogance the buyers, sellers, traders, and cashiers exhibit; the activities and alliances the underground denizens are involved in; the method they receive their ill-gotten goods; the blatant manner in which they advertise; and the personal data that is harvested every single hour of every day of the year. Numerous snippets of captured IRC chatter will illustrate the points raised, although the nicknames and the information harvested are obfuscated. The miscreants can make a handsome living through these activities. Even those without great skills can barter their way into large quantities of money they would never earn in the physical world. It is important to note that these miscreants are located all over the globe, and thus may be earning well above the average income for their areas.