Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism

By

[Writer's Name]

Presented to

[Supervisor's Name]

Information Technology in Criminal Justice (CIS170)

[University Name]

[Date]

Table of Content

Introduction3

Section 1: Definitions of Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism3

Sections 2: The History of Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism4

Section 3: Current forms of Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism4

Section 4: Investigation and Digital Forensics6

Section 5: Law Enforcement Roles and Responsibilities7

Conclusion9

References11

Introduction

The network is becoming the ideal place for criminals and terrorists to carry out their actions and activities. Hence, digital crime and digital terrorism have become two of the most serious threats seem to haunt Western societies. For this reason, the course of this paper has been dedicated to studying the digital threat, digital security policy and future prevention implications.

Section 1: Definitions of Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism

Digital crime is a major problem for businesses, and “pose the most potentially damaging threat to IT-related activities, transactions, and assets”, which involve money. There is a large underground economy for digital crime, which “includes organized crime, hackers for hire, disgruntled current and former employees, and other insiders (meaning people who have or had authorized access), and terrorists and their supporters”. The types of digital crimes include “thievery, fraud, and misdirection of communication, identity theft, intellectual property theft, corporate espionage, system sabotage, data destruction, money laundering, and terrorism”.

The digital-terrorism comprise of violent actions that strike terror carried out by one or more people on the Internet or through the improper use of communications technologies.

These groups prepare their shares through encrypted messages through email, preventing the penetration of the security agencies of states. Digital-terrorists are the people who want to radically, and entirely abrupt the democratic form of governments and established social system (Colarik, 2006).

Digital-terrorism is a low-cost weapon. However, it requires highly trained and dedicated people. At the same time, it remains difficult to track and cause damage to the enemy. Other than the traditional point of view of war and tactical, military doctrine, digital war and digital-terrorism incorporates other variables than the traditional battlegrounds (land, air and sea). These include two new fields which are the digital-space and information (Gustin, 2007).

Sections 2: The History of Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism

In July 2006, the State Department has admitted that it was the victim of cyber attack after a member of the East Asian Bureau accidentally opened an attachment to an email, which should not have been open (Labott, 2006). The attackers through this loop hole, by a small but malicious programs that have made their way to the computer's internal network of the state department, then followed by hacking computers of U.S. embassies around the East Asia region, and then, eventually, hackers infiltrated the computer systems and Washington, DC.

Section 3: Current forms of Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism

The potential for electronic government to make changes in technology has been emerging since many years. Since computers started to appear in government organizations, officials started to predict that there will be major changes in technology to assist public, as well. With the emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs), all organizations begin to consider ...