A new BBC World News six-part series on cybercrimes is set to debut on the network on Saturday, Nov. 1.
Cybercrimes with Ben Hammersley (pictured), produced in partnership with The Open University by Tern TV, delves into the dark world of hacking, now home to a new generation of highly-organized cybercriminals running complex commercial enterprises, involving leaders, planners, engineers, infantry and hired money mules. Hammersley, a technologist, investigates scam emails, threats to privacy of credit-card details, how drugs and guns can be bought anonymously on the darknet and governments' ability to spy on citizens or launch cyber war, the BBC said.
In sequence, the episodes will deal with, on Nov. 1-2, "Darknets" (such as The Silk Road, a drugs marketplace shut down by the FBI); on Nov. 8-9, "Heists" (including $45 million stolen from ATMs around the world in February 2013); on Nov. 15-16, "Scams" (in which Hammersley travels to Lagos, Nigeria, pictured, to meet online scammers in the global capital of that activity); on Nov. 17-18, "Piracy" (about the prosecution of Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay); on Nov. 29-30, "Cyber War" (about the computer worm Stuxnet deployed to attack Iran's nuclear development program), and on Dec. 6-7, "Surveillance (about the fallout from Edward Snowden's NSA revelations).
