Could A Small Town in Romania bring Australia to its Cyber-knees? Not if They Accede to the EU Convention on Cybercrime

• Author: Angela Adrian
• Position: Senior Lecturer, School of Law & Justice, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia
• Pages: 328-338

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328

Could A Small Town in Romania bring Australia to its Cyber-knees? Not

if They Accede to the EU Convention on Cybercrime

Dr. Angela Adrian

Senior Lecturer, School of Law & Justice

Southern Cross University

New South Wales, Australia

Angela.adrian@scu.edu.au

Abstract.

On 30 April 2010, Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, and Minister for

Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, announced Australia’s intention to accede to the Council of

Europe Convention on Cybercrime. (Media Release, 2010) The Convention is the only binding

international treaty on cybercrime. It serves as both a guide for nations developing comprehensive

national legislation on cybercrime and as a framework for interna tional co-operation between

signatory countries. Cyb ercrime poses a significant challenge for our law enforcement and

criminal justice system. The Internet makes it easy for criminals to operate from abroad,

especially from those countries where regulations a nd enforcement arrangements are weak. It is

critical that laws designed to combat cybercrime are harmonised, or at least comp atible to allow

for cooperation internationally. This paper explores what could happen if Hackerville set its sights

on Australia.

© 2012 Angela Adrian. Published by JICLT. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The small town of Râmnicu Vâlcea, three hours outside of Bucharest, is known among law enforcement officials

around the world as Hackerville. This is somewhat mislead ing. T he town is full of online crooks, but only a

small percentage of them are actual hackers. Most speci alize in ecommerce scams and malware attacks on

businesses. According to authorities, these schemes have brought te ns of millions of dollars into the area over the

past decade, fuelling the development of new apartment buildings, nightclubs, a nd shopping centres. Râmnicu

Vâlcea is a town whose business is cybercrime, and business is boo ming. (Bhattacharjee, 2011)

Once upon a time, some Romanian individuals decided to make some money in the world of ecommerce.

They developed a product they called Worryware. Worryware was malicious software that pretended to be

legitimate computer security software a nd claimed to detect a variety of threats that did not actually exist. The

user of the affected computer was then told that they must p urchase the company’s anti-virus software in order to

repair their co mputers. Next, t he users are hassled with aggressive and disruptive notifica tions until they supply

their credit card number and pay for the worthless “anti-virus” product. T he product is, in fact, fake. W hen their

operation had caused more t han $74 million i n total losses to more than one million computer user s the AFP

(Australia Federal Police) and the ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organization) stepped in to stop them.

(story based upon a true FBI investigation).

This article has been retracted at the request of Dr. Alana Maurushat.

Reason: The author has plagiarised some sections of the articles from

various sources, notably from the published work of Alana Maurushat,

“Australia’s succession to the Cybercrime Convention: is the Convention

still relevant in combatting crime in the era of Botnets and Obfuscation

Crime Tools?” UNSW Law Journal Vol 33(2) 2010 Forum (Australia’s

Accession to the Cyber-crime Convention) pp 431-47