BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, welcome to the programme.

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it's to prepare.

Those horrible, seemingly distant nightmares, like global pandemics, they do eventually catch up with you.

Pandemics are one, but the experience of it reminded us of another very different risk

to business. Cybercrime. You can always push thinking about it to tomorrow, and yet when tomorrow

comes, what do you do? Well, as it happens, COVID has brought new challenges for dealing with

cybercrime, with so many office staff working from home and logging in remotely.

So we thought we would take a look at it today.

And to start, I'm joined by Jeff White, whose book, Crime.com, was published in August this year.

It looks at how hacking has gone global.

Jeff's also an investigative technology journalist.

And Jeff, crime has always been with us.

Cybercrime, a relatively new phenomenon.

Can you tell us where and when it started?

Well, cybercrime really goes back to the birth of computers.

You know, as soon as computers were created, people were tinkering with them.

You've got to realize the folks who invented the internet, these were engineers. And hacking, as the term we use today, is actually an engineering term. You know, if you have an old motorbike, an old car, you hack it. You hack it to make it go faster. You hack it to fix it, to change it. The big change, of course, was the sort of mid-90s when suddenly

credit cards come onto the internet. So e-commerce starts middle of the 90s. eBay and Amazon both

get going in 96. Prior to that, yes, you could hack, you could commit some crimes. There were

cyber crimes before then, but to make big money, you needed money to be on the web, and that

happened in the mid-90s. So really, you can kind of date the boom in cybercrime from that

...