Cyber Crime

Cybercrime is the new breed of crime. Its origin can be traced to the growing dependence on computers in modern life. Cybercrime has assumed sinister implications today.

Today, the world is moving towards a point where everything from banking, stock exchanges, air traffic control, telephones to electric power, health care, welfare, and education depends on software. As a result, the increased capacities of information systems today come at the cost of increased vulnerability. Information technology has begun to produce criminal opportunities of a variety that the brightest criminals of yore could not even begin to dream about.

A cybercrime may be theft of information services, communication, in furtherance of criminal conspiracies, telecommunications piracy, electronic money laundering, electronic vandalism and terrorism, sales and investment fraud, illegal interception of telecommunications, and electronic funds transfer fraud.

Another variety of cybercrime relates to sales and investment fraud. As electronic commerce or also increases. E-commerce becomes more and more popular, the application of digital technology to fraudulent crime

Illegal interception of information is another variety of fraud, Developments in telecommunications as well as data transfer over the net have resulted in greater speed and capacity but also greater vulnerability. It is now easier than ever before for unauthorized people to gain access to sensitive information to the extent that electromagnetic signals emitted by a computer themselves can now be intercepted and cables may act as broadcast antennas.

Cybercrime may be perpetrated through unauthorized access, e-mail bombing, data diddling, salami attack, internet time theft, logic bomb, virus/worm attack, Trojan attack, denial of service attack, distributed denial of service attack, e-mail spoofing, intellectual property crime, or cyberstalking.

Unauthorized access, also known as cracking as opposed to hacking, means gaining access to a system without the permission of the users or without proper authority, generally done either by faking identity or by cracking access codes. E-mail bombing means sending a large number of emails to the victim resulting in the victim’s mail account in case of an individual) or server (in case of corporations) crashing.

While data diddling is a kind of attack which involves altering the raw data before it is processed by a system and re-altering it after processing. Salami attack is generally used to commit financial crimes.

Internet time theft connotes the usage by an unauthorized person of Internet time paid for by someone else. A virus/worm attack is a programme that attaches itself to another file or a system and then circulates to other files and to other computers via a network. This attack usually affects computers by either altering or deleting data from it and differs from worms, which do not interfere with data; they simply multiply until they fill all available space on the computer.

While a Trojan is a program that causes some damage under the disguise of a useful programme, a denial of service attack involves flooding the computer resource with more requests than it can handle. This causes the resource to crash, thereby denying the authorized users the service.

Cybercrime can be prevented to a certain extent by using firewalls, frequently changing passwords, safe surfing, frequent virus checks, and using e-mail filters.

A commonly employed method to prevent cyber-attack is the frequent checking of one’s computer for viruses and worms. Also, any external media such as floppy disks and CD ROMS should always be virus checked before running. For people using e-mails, they should employ e-mail filters, which monitor the inflow of emails to the inbox and delete automatically any suspicious or useless mails, thus, reducing the chances of being bombed or spoofed.

Due to the brisk pace at which the information highway is entering our homes, we are all at increased risk of being affected by cybercrime. Since everything about our lives is in some manner affected by computers, it is high time that we understand that cybercrime is not the problem of only those people who use computers, but it is everyone’s problem.