Cyber Crime

Introduction

Cyber crime is the exploit of computer technology to commit crime. Individuals who desire to use a computer as a tool to smooth the progress of unlawful activity may find that the Internet provides a vast, inexpensive, and potentially anonymous way to commit unlawful acts, such as fraud, the sale or distribution of child pornography, the auction of guns or drugs or other regulated substances without regulatory protections, and the unlawful distribution of computer software or other original material protected by intellectual property rights. (Thomas et al, 20-100)

Categories of cyber crime

The two wide-ranging categories of cyber crime are sex crimes and illegally accessing and destroying data.

Sex crimes

Sex crimes take account of online child pornography, child luring, and related offenses. The internet has unfortunately provided pedophiles with a new tool, to have relative secrecy and continuous access to commit crimes like child pornography, which is traded 24 hours a day in online chat rooms, and thousands of images of child sex abuse are available in easily accessible newsgroups. In supplement, pedophiles can lurk round chat rooms, passages, and note planks and use email to lure young kids for sex. (www.cert.org)

Illegally accessing

Illegally accessing and decimating data (Hacking) encompass, cyber lawless persons breaking, (hacking) into computer systems and getting facts and figures that is illegal for them to have, such as borrowing card figures, bank records, programs ciphers, and unlawfully downloading copyright- protected material like melodies and movies. They can also get into computers illegally and change financial records, school records and grades; also there are trade secret thefts, network intrusions, chip thefts, and other types of high technology thefts (Blitz, 20-103).

Cyber Terrorism

    Cyber terrorism might be the most overlooked type of terrorism there is, because it has been going on for the shortest amount of time. The problem with this is that, there needs to be stricter laws and restrictions on internet and computer activity. The amount of possible information at anyone with even a little computer savvy could turn anyone into a cyber terrorist (Darrel Menthe, 45). The possibilities for such an action are endless. An example of cyber terrorism would be hacking into a hospital computer mainframe and giving someone a lethal dose of their prescribed medicine. Many other such cyber acts of terrorism would include: creating a virus to shut down an entire banks database or even the entire stock market, creating some type of e-mail bug that crashes thousands of computers around the world (Collin Barry 67).

cyber terrorism, one must wonder if saving time and energy is really worth the possible destruction of the United States, or possibly the world. With items such as the war games that have been simulated on our Governments computer systems, one can only hope to become more aware of the possible dangers associated along with computer hacking. Tough laws targeted towards cyber terrorism are making some people shy away from trying to be a hacker. Just like everything else though, nothing is fool proof, and where there is a will, ...