Organized crime is winning the Internet security war, specialists warned at the world's foremost gathering of computer hackers in Las Vegas on Saturday.

The online peril is no longer brilliant young social outcasts penetrating networks for notoriety; it is international crime rings swiping billions of dollars with keystrokes and malicious computer codes, cyber cops agreed.

Ironically, potential champions in the battle for Internet privacy were sought among the thousands of hackers that made pilgrimages to the US gambling centre nicknamed "Sin City" for the three-day DefCon 14 conference.

Online evil doers were crime rings working out of countries such as Russia, Romania and Brazil, and their nefarious technical skills were keeping ahead of computer security experts, veterans of the cyber-crime battle said.

"We are getting our butts kicked, there is no doubt about it," said Dan Hubbard, vice-president of security research at Websense. "There is a lot more of a bond and a sharing of tools in their society than in ours."

DefCon, in its 14th year, was a neutral ground where hackers, computer security professionals and US government agents exchanged expertise, according to organizers.

"The hacker is the good guy," said Joe Grand, who described himself as an inventor by day and a hardware hacker by night. "A hacker is someone interested in figuring out how to make things work."

Kenneth Geers explained that he was at DefCon to glean new hacking tactics and recruit talent to join him at his job hardening the US military's computer network.

"If we are not getting into the weeds and hearing what the hackers are saying about weaknesses and vulnerabilities, we are absolutely screwed," Geers said. "We seek out rock star hackers because they live and breathe this stuff."

For Geers, the goal was to prevent aircraft carriers' communications from being routed to enemies or missile guidance systems from being compromised.

Online onslaughts were a relentless reality for ordinary computer users, said Gadi Evron, who managed Internet security for the Israeli Government before going to work for the firms SecuriTeam and Beyond Security.

"A lot of it involves the mafia," Evron said during a panel discussion titled "Internet Wars 2006."

More than US$2 billion will be stolen this year by online "phishing," using fake websites and bogus e-mails to trick people into revealing personal information then used for identity theft, according to Evron.

That loss will be multiplied by attacks involving the secret implanting of computer codes that can do things such as record keystrokes used for online banking or take remote control of computers, Evron said.

Source: China Daily