The Securities and Exchange Commission has filled half of about sixty new jobs for cyberfraud cops patrolling the Internet, Reuters reports. The wire service says a top SEC official, enforcement director Richard Walker, told the 18th annual Federal Securities Institute meeting here that the SEC plans to add up to 100 people to its 850-member enforcement staff of lawyers and analysts, with 50 to 60 of them dedicated to fighting Net fraud.
This comes in the wake of spam-bomb denial-of-service attacks which froze several of the Net's major Web sites, including E*Trade, the second-largest online brokerage in the United States.
SEC chairman Arthur Levitt says fighting Net fraud is a top priority, considering the ease of spreading false information by e-mail, chat rooms, and Web sites makes the Web ripe for fraud, Reuters says.
``There is a sort of a climate of lawlessness...'Let's try this, let's try that,''' Walker told conference delegates. ``You can't play games on the Internet. It's not Game Boy.''
Walker also referred to last week's hack of Aastrom Biosciences, in which the hacker posted a fake press release announcing a merger with Geron Corp. ``We've got to locate the hackers and bring them to justice,'' he told the conference.
Reuters says the SEC is concerned particularly about momentum sites - where investors are pushed to buy certain stock at certain times to build momentum and drive the price higher - and "cybersmears," where negative news about companies hits the Internet to drive the stock prices down and drive the profits of short sellers up.
