Gangs flooding the Web for prey, analyst say.
The good news at least we know thier organized, the bad news is we're the target.

(CNN) -- On December 8, Australia suffered a sneak-attack from malevolent forces based in the former Soviet states. The weaponry was a multi-million fusillade of bogus e-mail touts targeting customers of iiNet, owner of Ozemail, one of the most popular Internet providers in the country.

The barrage overwhelmed company servers, which saw e-mail traffic spike from a daily average of 12 million messages to nearly 20 million -- 98 percent of which were spam -- and caused a 10-minute delay for users.

"We're seeing a lot of spam coming from China and Eastern Europe," says Greg Bader, chief information officer of iiNet. "They are organizations that are obviously very well set up and funded in order to release the volume of email they're pumping out."

Cybercrime is big business. The FBI estimates that computer-related crimes -- such as virus attacks and identity theft -- have cost companies and consumers $400 billion in the United States alone, according to a September report.

Disappearing are the days of high-profile attacks by teenage hackers motivated less by monetary gain than creating mayhem. Organized gangs now use "KGB-style tactics" to recruit programmers in universities to write software for high-tech crimes, according to a recent study by IT security firm McAfee.

As the talent pool grows, so do the tactics employed for computer crimes. The localized e-mail assault in Australia this month shows how cyber criminals now favor targeted attacks rather than widespread releases of malicious software, or "malware," such as the MyDoom computer worm which struck around the world in 2004.

In the past year, digital threats grew 163 percent, according a report by IT security company Trend Micro.

Read all about it here, courtesy of cnn.com.

Eric