Filed by KOSU News in Art & Life.
January 26, 2010

Attacking corporate Web sites and stealing personal financial information is no longer just the work of hackers. These days the mob is also taking an interest.

From San Francisco to Costa Rica to London to Russia, Joseph Menn’s new book Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, follows the evolution of digital crime from small-time thieving to organized gangs — all vying for a piece of a trillion-dollar pie.

Menn follows the book’s hero — real-life cyber-crime fighter Barrett Lyon — on a global investigation that uncovers alliances between the Russian mafia and the Russian government, and reveals how La Cosa Nostra and the Russians fight it out for control of the Internet’s massive spoils.

Menn covers Internet security and technology for the Financial Times; Barrett Lyon is a self-taught digital-crime fighter and CEO of his own stealth-mode startup, 3Crowd. Both men join host Terry Gross for a conversation about how cyber-crime is much worse than we thought — and why they argue that the Internet might not survive. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio