CYBER CRIMES

Cyber Crimes



Cyber Crimes

Introduction

Broadly speaking, one can classify cybercrimes in two categories. First, there are crimes that require a computer and cannot be committed in any other way or against any other type of victim. These also include crimes where the computer is the target of the offense, for example, unauthorized access to systems, tampering with programs and data, and planting viruses. Second, there are familiar or conventional crimes that are facilitated by computers and information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as “cyber” versions of identity theft, stalking, pedophile activities, or trading counterfeit goods. Hamelink (2000) mentions in some cases, criminal activities may encompass both categories. For example, acts of terrorism can involve qualitatively new offenses enabled by computer technologies or, alternatively, may integrate cyberspace into more traditional activities, such as planning, intelligence, logistics, and finance. Finally, there are several activities that are not strictly cybercrimes, insofar as they are not illegal, but they may cause what most people would consider harm to some users (such as certain forms of pornography, gambling, unsolicited e-mail, or unregulated sales of medicines and prescription drugs) (Hamelink, 2000). This paper discusses cyber crimes in a concise and comprehensive way.

Cyber Crimes: A Discussion

Distributed denial of service attacks rank among the most widely reported cyber-crimes. They first appeared in mid-1999 and are relatively easy to perpetrate. Many of the tools required to carry them off are freely available online. Often, DDS attack networks consist of hundreds of compromised systems. The attacker inaugurates the attack sequence from one or more consoles, and it can affect thousands of systems worldwide.

Virus programs infect computer files by inserting copies of themselves into those files; they are spread from host to host when users transmit infected files by e-mail, over the Internet, across a company's network, or by disk. The Melissa Virus interrupted e-mail service around the world when it was posted to an Internet newsgroup on March 26, 1999, affecting perhaps 100,000 users and one-fifth of all U.S. businesses (Hamelink, 2000). Related problems include worms, which can travel within a computer or network without a user transmitting files; trojan horses, which are disguised as innocuous files but which, once activated, can steal users' login names and passwords, thus facilitating identity theft; and logic bombs, programs activated by a specific event.

Two reports issued by the CIA's National Intelligence Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in December 2000 predicted that, during the first two decades of the 21st century, Internet-enabled terrorists would launch attacks on the United States with computer viruses and logic bombs in an attempt to destroy America's private-sector infrastructure. The reports also envisioned a future cyber-arms race, for which the United States would need to develop a "cyber-arsena" (Newman and Ronald, 2003).

The Internet facilitates terrorism by permitting virtually anonymous communication among terror-ists—transmissions that are very difficult to track and intercept. The targets of cyber-terrorists could include air-traffic systems and stock exchanges (Newman and Ronald, 2003). Hackers even have successfully broken into governmental systems and launched denial-of-service ...