CYBER CRIME

With the increasing use of the internet for communication and other purposes, comes a very big threat to security. This threat is known as cyber crimes. Cyber crimes are crimes committed with the use of the internet. These crimes may go on to include forgery, blackmail, fraud, theft and so on.

Examples of some early crimes :

1. In 1986 Riggs was first convicted for his unauthorized use of a computer and was sentenced to a mere 15 days of community service and placed on probation for 18 months. In 1990 Riggs was indicted again for making unauthorized access to computers, during which he stole proprietary information from a telephone company.

2. In March 1997, a young hacker disabled the telephone service at the Worcester, Massachusetts airport for six hours, which disabled the air-traffic control system and other critical services. This same hacker also copied patients' records from a computer in a pharmacy on four separate occasions in January, February, and March 1997. This hacker was the first juvenile to be prosecuted by the U.S. Government for computer crime.

3. Last year in India, a teenager had met some people on ORKUT ( a social space like facebook). His conversations show that he became friends with them and was supposed to meet them at a particular place. The teenager was found murdered and robbed. Every one was shocked with this incident. Our school introduced a new rule - that no student was permitted to have an orkut id or use orkut.


One of the most common cyber crime is piracy of music and movies. Music and Movie piracy refers to the unlawful downloading of copyrighted material via the internet. Downloading music and movies has become so easy with the introduction of p2p networking and softwares like limewire, torrents, etc. This has made it more difficult for the authorities to deal with these problems.


In July 2001, a cyber-attack called “Code-Red” infected more than 350,000 Microsoft IIS servers and brought down several web application infrastructures. In January 2003, another cyber-attack called “Slammer” disrupted services of nearly 75,000 computers. Figures 1 and 2 show the increasing number of cyber-crime incidents that are taking place on the Internet today, which are costing billions of dollars of business-losses.


NUMBER OF CYBER CRIME INCIDENTS REPORTED EVERY YEAR.



Cyber-crime incidents experienced in 2005 by type of incident and percentage of surveyed
organizations (survey published by the Australian High Tech Crime Centre)

Is the "medium is the message" ?

Marshll Mcluhan coined the phrase "the medium is the message". This means that the medium influences how the message is perceived. In his book - 'Understanding Media', McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. He believed that the content might have little effect on the society. For example, if a television broadcasts children shows or violent shows, the effect of television (and not the shows) on society would be identical and profound. He pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to see during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself — the content.

Marshall Mcluhan's theories are not universally accepted. There are some theories that go against his way of thinking.
For instance, Consider a physical recording medium like a CD or DVD. By itself it's an empty vessel. The "message" is the information contained within that medium, whether it be music, a film, software, or some other information. The message is what provides the value -- the actual recording medium is often not very important. You may pay $20 for a CD that contains music, or you may pay $300 for a CD that contains certain software. But the physical CD's are essentially identical except for the information they contain. This price difference isn't due to a difference in the medium but rather due to a difference in the message.
For example, in most cases your job title represents the medium of your career. Career media include being an attorney, a salesperson, or a computer programmer. Think of your career medium as the vessel through which you work. Much like a recordable CD, your career medium is an empty container waiting to be filled. If you identify yourself as an attorney or a salesperson or a computer programmer, that doesn't give you any sense of the value your work provides. Those professions are conduits for providing value, but they contain very little value in and of themselves.It isn't hard to recognize that the primary value comes not from the medium of your career (i.e. your particular job) but rather from the message of your career. The message is what you bring to your career. It's what fills the otherwise empty container.