cybercrime

The falling crime figures in the Netherlands sometimes clash with reality, National Police chief Erik Akerbom said on Wednesday at the presentation of the police's annual results for 2017. Last year crime figures fell by 11 percent, the fifth year in a row that there's been a decline.

Albanian criminals are increasingly playing leading roles in organized crime in Amsterdam, according to a so-called trend analysis by the Amsterdam police. They are mainly engaged in cocaine trafficking, but also in human trafficking and property fraud, NU.nl reports.

According to the police, these Albanian criminals lead the cocaine import from South America, the transhipment via the port of Rotterdam, and the further distribution to other European countries from Amsterdam. In addition to the Netherlands, Albanians are also very active in the drug trade in Great Britain.

The Dutch government and businesses in the Netherlands need to work together to create a kind of national firewall to protect important websites and apps against DDoS attacks, five experts in digital security plead in an open letter, NOS reports.

Currently banks, telecom providers, energy companies and other businesses all individually hire security companies to help prevent such cyber attacks. But that is not enough to stop these types of attacks, the experts warn. If they worked together, they could prevent an attack one one company from having success at another company.

The websites of the Dutch Tax Authority and DigiD were hit by DDoS attacks on Wednesday afternoon. As a result no tax declarations could be filed for hours, and people had trouble logging in to various government websites, NU.nl reports.

The attack on the Tax Authority started around 3:00 p.m., and DigiD was hit around 3:25 p.m. Both sites were fully accessible again by 8:00 p.m.

The attack did not affect the security of taxpayer's data, not even if people were filing declarations when the DDoS attack started, a spokesperson for the Tax Authority said to the newspaper. 

The United States is blaming Russia for a ransomware attack that infected countless computers around the world last year. In the Netherlands container terminal APM in the port of Rotterdam, pharmaceutical MSD, and package carrier TNT were infected by the ransomware called NotPetya or Petya.

An 18-year-old Oosterhout man arrested in connection with DDoS attacks on Dutch financial institutions, wanted "to show that a teenager can simply crash all banks with a relatively simple attack", suspect Jelle S. wrote in an email to the Volkskrant shorty before his arrest.

ABN Amro, ING, Rabobank and the Tax Authority again faced DDoS attacks on Tuesday, though this time the financial services managed to deter them better than over the weekend. The attacks caused a short disruption in payment system iDeal, but the problems were quickly restored, NOS reports.

ABN Amro was troubled by attacks all day long, but they were mostly successfully fought off, a spokesperson said to the broadcaster. Around 5:30 p.m. the bank faced a short disruption.

The Dutch Tax Authority was hit by a DDoS attack on Monday, NOS reports. According to the tax service, its site was difficult to reach for a time on Monday morning, but everything should be working again. Three Dutch banks also faced such cyber attacks since Saturday.

Dutch banks ABN Amro and ING were both hit by DDoS attacks over the weekend, leaving customers unable to use their mobile- or online banking for hours at a time, NOS reports.

In a DDoS attack large amounts of data traffic is sent to a particular website, overloading its server and thereby crashing the site. 

A gang of Romanian cyber criminals suspected of infecting computers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and the United States with ransomware, was busted in Romania last week in coordinated investigations by the Dutch, Romanian, British, and American authorities and Europol, the Dutch police said in a statement.

Registered crime in the Netherlands dropped for the second year in a row in 2016, according to the criminal law and enforcement report published by Statistics Netherlands, scientific research and documentation center WODC and the Judicial Council on Monday. The police registered fewer crimes and arrested fewer suspects in 2016 than in 2015, resulting a decrease in cases through almost the entire criminal law chain.