I) Choose the most suitable word to complete the sentence:

1. Luke and his son could conduct the experiment after getting…from the authorities.

a) money b) ideas c) approval

2. The devices, which let people download and install applications, are called…

a) ordinary mobile phones b) HDTV c) smartphones

3. …have opened up a new dimension to mobile computing that is seducing consumers.

a) ordinary phones b) PCs c) tablets

4. The main aim of Apple, Google is to delight…

a) businesses b) governments c) individuals

Text 23 Measuring the black web

Big numbers and online crime go together. One well-worn assertion is that cybercrime revenues exceed those from the global trade in illegal drugs. Another nice round number is the $1 trillion-worth of intellectual property that, cybercriminals snaffle annually.

It is hard to know what to make of these numbers. Online crooks do not file quarterly reports. In the absence of figures from the practitioners, experts tend to fall back on surveys of victims, often compiled by firms that sell security software. These have a whiff of self interest about them: they are the kind of studies that get press released but not peer reviewed.

A paper by two researchers at Microsoft shows why: because losses are unevenly distributed. Most people never have their bank accounts raided by cyber criminals, but an unfortunate few do, and lose a lot. This means that per capita losses, which the surveys calculate before extrapolating to a national figure, are dominated by a handful of big online heists. Errors in the reporting of such infrequent crimes have a huge effect on the headline figure.

The few researchers who have observed cyber criminals in action are sceptical about the industry’s estimates. They tracked around 20 outfits that use spam to advertise illegal online pharmacies. First they secretly monitored the spammers’ payment systems. Then they obtained logs from one of the servers that power the illegal pharmaceutical sites. They even ordered (and—perhaps surprisingly—received) some of the non-prescription drugs on sale.

Their findings suggest that only two of the 20 or so operators bring in $1m or more per month. The criminals behind fake security software appear to reap similar reward. Their study puts the annual revenue of each criminal group at a few tens of millions of dollars.

The security industry claims that some spammers make millions every day. The security industry sometimes plays “fast and loose” with the numbers, because it has an interest in “telling people that the sky is falling”.

None of this means that the threat of cybercrime can be written off as pure invention, or that people should turn off their spam filters. But in the grand scheme of criminal threats, hacker kingpins do not appear to be on a par with Colombian drug lords—even if the security industry would wish it otherwise.

Reading Comprehension