Cyber Policing Crosses Borders

"Anyone could be a victim — sometimes it's an individual, sometimes it's groups and sometimes it's companies," Larkin said. "The bad guys are getting more sophisticated."

Corporate Frauds

While consumers are often susceptible to broad, large-scale operations like phishing and auction frauds, corporate fraud is still dominated by insider indiscretions. Employees with knowledge of a company and access to the company's computer systems are the number one threat to corporate property and financial security.

"The insider is still the biggest threat. Access is the key to most of these crimes because insiders are able to access information and then set up a way to use it for themselves," said Kevin Barrows, a vice president at Stroz Friedberg, a consulting and technical services firm specializing in computer forensics and computer and private investigations.

Barrows spent seven years as an FBI agent, investigating white collar crimes and bank fraud before joining Stroz Friedberg in 2002 as a computer forensics and cybercrime expert.

Theft of intellectual property is most often committed by corporate insiders, and Barrows said the most common form of corporate fraud is document alteration. As corporate commerce becomes increasingly electronic, creative criminals now change dated documents or alter financial figures in creative ways that are undetectable to the untrained eye.

Cyber forensics investigators can track these things within computer hard drives or computer systems to find how they were changed and who is responsible.

"We can go in and find every form of a document that was ever on a computer. These things are growing, but people are becoming more aware of the problems. That's why they're valuing cybercrime experts to stay ahead of the curve," Barrows said.