The word cyber and its relative dot.com are probably the
most commonly used terminologies of the modern era. In the information age the
rapid development of computers, telecommunications and other technologies has
led to the evolution of new forms of trans-national crimes known as cyber
crimes. Cyber crimes have virtually no boundaries and may affect every country
in the world. They may be defined as any crime with the help of computer and
telecommunication technology, with the purpose of influencing the functioning
of computer or the computer systems. The extent of loss involved worldwide of
cyber crimes is tremendous as it is estimated that about 500 million people who
use the Internet can be affected by the emergence of cyber crimes. Cyber crimes
are a very serious threat for the times to come and pose one of the most
difficult challenges before the law enforcement machinery Most cyber crimes do
not involve violence but rather greed, pride, or play on some character
weakness of the victims. It is difficult to identify the culprit, as the Net
can be a vicious web of deceit and can be accessed from any part of the globe.
For these reasons, cyber crimes are considered.
Hacking
It is the most common type of Cyber crime being committed
across the world. Hacking has been defined in section 66 of The Information
Technology Act, 2000 as follows "whoever with the intent to cause or
knowing that he is likely to cause wrongful loss or damage to the public or any
person destroys or deletes or alters any information residing in a computer
resource or diminishes its value or utility or affects it injuriously by any
means commits hacking".
Security Related Crimes
With the growth of the internet, network security has become
a major concern. Private confidential information has become available to the
public. Confidential information can reside in two states on the network. It
can reside on the physical stored media, such as hard drive or memory or it can
reside in the transit across the physical network wire in the form of packets.
These two information states provide opportunities for attacks from users on
the internal network, as well as users on the Internet.
Network Packet Sniffers
IP Spoofing
Password attacks
Distribution of sensitive internal information to external
sources:
Man-in-the-middle-attacks
Fraud On The Internet
This is a form of white collar crime. Internet fraud is a
common type of crime whose growth has been proportionate to the growth of
internet itself. The internet provides companies and individuals with the
opportunity of marketing their products on the net. It is easy for people with
fraudulent intention to make their messages look real and credible. There are
innumerable scams and frauds most of them relating to investment schemes and
have been described in detail below as follows:
Online investment newsletters
Bulletin boards
E-mail scams
Credit card fraud
Making available digital signature for fraudulent purpose
Alteration And Destruction Of Digital Information
The corruption and destruction of digital information is the
single largest menace facing the world of computers. This is introduced by a
human agent with the help of various programmes which have been described in
detail below as follows:
Virus Just as a virus can infect the human immunity system
there exist programs, which, can destroy or hamper computer systems. A computer
virus is a programme designed to replicate and spread, generally with the
victim being oblivious to its existence. Computer viruses spread by attaching
themselves to programmes like word processor or spreadsheets or they attach
themselves to the boot sector of a disk. When an infected file is activated or
when the computer is started from an infected disk, the virus itself is also
executed.
Pornography On The Net
The growth of technology has flip side to it causing
multiple problems in everyday life. Internet has provided a medium for the
facilitation of crimes like pornography. Cyber porn as it is popularly called
is widespread. Almost 50% of the web sites exhibit pornographic material on the
Internet today. Pornographic materials can be reproduced more quickly and
cheaply on new media like hard disks, floppy discs and CD-Roms. The new
technology is not merely an extension of the existing forms like text,
photographs and images. Apart from still pictures and images, full motion video
clips and complete movies are also available. Another great disadvantage with a
media like this is its easy availability and accessibility to children who can
now log on to pornographic web-sites from their own houses in relative
anonymity and the social and legal deterrents associated with physically
purchasing an adult magazine from the stand are no longer present. Furthermore,
there are more serious offences which have universal disapproval like child
pornography and far easier for offenders to hide and propagate through the
medium of the internet.
