The criminals have new targets these days, the officials said. Increasingly, they are targeting sectors like retail and hospitality, instead of simply focusing on financial institutions, Martinez said. "Why hack into Citibank and steal 10 million pieces of information when you could hack into restaurants and get the same information and not have a big target, a bulls-eye, on your back?"

The open markets for talent make it easier for criminals to do things like steal money from companies, as well as attack governments. Espionage traditionally involved setting up a mole in a foreign country, which involves a lot of time and work for someone to build a false life. But today, with low overhead and minimal risk, someone can hack into computers and mirror hard drives to get the same kind of information that moles used to, Snow said.

To try to head off all kinds of cybercrime, the groups have beefed up their enforcement efforts. The Secret Service, for example, has 31 task forces in the U.S. dedicated to electronic crimes. The Seattle task force, started in 2006, has seized US$14.2 million in funds stolen electronically. The group has arrested 150 people and examined almost 1,700 computers including 128 terabytes of data, said Jim Helminski, special agent in charge with the Secret Service.

The IDG News Service