mi2g reports that criminal syndicates are using the cover of war to work the Internet:

Thousands of eCommerce servers
with credit card databases and customer addresses have been attacked by anti-war and pro-Islamic hackers since 19th March. This is proving to be a useful lever for criminal syndicates with a global reach, who are engaged in routine surveillance and reconnaissance activities on Internet credit card sales points as well as susceptible individuals and small groups within financial services.

Senior sources within financial services in Europe, Middle East and Africa have brought it to the attention of the mi2g Intelligence Unit that employees with potential anti-American feelings have been targeted by global crime syndicates this month to extract sensitive information about trading patterns, merchant IDs and customer account numbers. The abnormal level of probing based on invoking common religious and cultural ties between the interlocutors coincides with the launch of the War on Iraq and a strengthening wave of anti-American sentiments.

The War on Iraq has intensified the activity of criminal syndicates as they participate in mass identity and credit card theft as well as trade in counterfeit and contraband goods. On the surface the friendly requests to insiders are made by criminals on the basis of engaging the susceptible individual to participate in charitable religious or cultural causes, but the real agenda is to garner the identities, account and credit card numbers and financial transactions of a large and disparate sample of customers handled through the targeted
individual.

Once equipped with stolen electronic alter-egos, criminal syndicates are crossing borders without detection and are financing trade in contraband goods and illicit materials in return for cash or weapons. The war zones of Israel/Palestine, Kashmir, Turkey/Iraq, Afghanistan/Pakistan and their neighbouring countries in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa are all affected by the overwhelming force of global crime syndicates camouflaged in the barrage of anti-American cyber warfare and hacktivism.

This is bad all the way around, EXCEPT for the part about fleecing anti-American douchebags - couldn't happen to a nicer bunch - but I am distrubed by who is getting the money and what they are doing with it.