Companies busy slashing IT budgets and reducing their technical workforces could unwittingly be contributing to the global cybercrime epidemic.

With thousands of scarily bright software engineers suddenly on the unemployment heap thanks to the global financial crisis, there’s growing concern many of them will turn their talents over to the ‘dark side’.

It’s not hard to understand why. If you’ve got the skills and mental aptitude to develop top-rate software, chances are you’ve been paid pretty handsomely to do it. But with development projects being shelved and teams scaled back, corporate demand for those skills is quickly drying up.

So what are the choices? You can join the growing ranks at your local employment office, take a job in a different area, or put your skills to a new and potentially very lucrative use.

There’s no denying that cybercrime pays well – very well indeed. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but anecdotal evidence puts the global problem in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year category. That’s good money in anyone’s language.

I’ve just spent a few days with Russian security company Kaspersky and had the opportunity to discuss this problem with company CEO and founder Eugene Kaspersky. By his reckoning, the ranks of cyber criminals is set to swell during the next 12 months as the global economic meltdown continues to wash across the globe.

As someone who knows more than most about the seedy online underworld, he is genuinely concerned about the impact this will have on both companies and individuals.

Now it’s easy to dismiss such comments as a thinly veiled attempt to spark fear and sell more internet security products. But I get the sense that his concern is much more deep seated.

Kaspersky points to the growing sophistication of the internet-based attacks his company monitors for around the clock. Gone are the days of viruses and worms designed to be little more than an ego trip for their creator. Now the primary motivation is cold hard cash.

Bank account passwords, credit card details and other personal information is the goal of today’s cyber criminals. And, as more of our daily lives moves online, their chances of securing such information is rapidly increasing.

So what can the average business or internet user do? As well as obvious steps such as ensuring systems are as secure as they can be, it’s also time to start lobbying for more government attention to the problem.

Only by improving online law enforcement and bringing more cybercriminals to justice can the appeal of the dark side be reduced. This will require significant investment, but it will be money well spent.

Let’s push for an increase in federal spending on cybercrime. The benefit will be a more secure online world in which commerce can flourish. Failure to do so will have severe consequences for the future of the Australian economy.