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)