Online criminals are using state of the art business strategies to commit cybercrimes.

A security report by Cisco outlines some of the technical and business strategies that criminals have adopted in order to breach corporate networks and steal information and money.

The Conficker Worm is still active and it’s estimated that several million computer systems are under Conficker’s control as of June 2009.

Criminals are exploiting breaking news stories to drive traffic to websites they control. The Swine Flu epidemic was quickly utilised and cybercriminals blanketed the web with emails advertising preventative drugs linking to fake pharmacies.

Many spammers are now switching from high volumes of spam to lower but more frequent volumes in order to stay under the radar following the successful closure of McColo, which was responsible for almost 50% of all spam.

Botnet owners are now renting their networks out to other criminals to deliver spam and malware via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Spam remains the major vehicle of distribution for worms and malware. Spammers sent 180 billion spam messages a day, almost 90% of world email traffic, to drive traffic to both legitimate sales pitches and malicious websites.

Social networks have made it easier to launch worm attacks as users are more likely to click links they believe were sent to them by friends on the network.

Cisco said 2009 also saw the start of two or three text or SMS campaigns per week targeting mobile phones.

“With some 4.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, a criminal may cast an extraordinarily wide net and still walk away with a nice profit, even if the attack yields only a small fraction of victims,” Cisco said.