How to Prevent a Cybercrime - Literature review Example

? Cybercrime Prevention Guide Computer sciences and Information technology Insert 2nd March Introduction and overview Cyber Crime is a commonly used term since the inception of computers, especially the Internet. A cyber crime is defined in the book ‘Computer security: a bibliography with indexes’ as ‘any crime using the computer and the computer networks’ (Potts, 2002). This broadens the scope of cybercrimes immensely with the advent of the technology, as the majority has the access to the computer and the internet. Also, the case when a computer is used to save the information concerning illegal stuff also comes in crime domain. Thus, any unlawful activity where a computer is used as a tool or a target or both comes under the definition of the cyber crime. Cyber Crimes can be categorized in the followings, according to Potts (2002): A crime where a computer or different computers are targeted over the network, for example, spreading of viruses etc. The computer may also be used to commit the traditional crimes, as widely used and easy access; for example, illegal gambling, money frauds etc. The computer may also be used as a file cabinet to store illegal information. For instance, drug trafficker using the computer to store the data of his sources, inventory etc. There seems to be not much between conventional crimes and the cyber crimes, but still if we dig deep then as per the above mentioned definitions a cyber crime is any crime where the computer is used. Laws are introduced and enforced in most of the countries to counter the cyber crime because there used to be a time when this was not unlawful as per the laws of most the countries and provisions are being made in order to cater this. With the growth in computer technology, new ways are being devised by the criminals in order to perform the illegal activities; the same is being done in order to cater against these (Brenner, 2010). Logic Bomb Attack on an Organization One of the examples that may be given is the logic bomb attack on the data of an organization. First of all, it important to define a Logic Bomb Attack and the harm it may induce to an organization. A Logic Bomb Attack may also be called as slag code. It is basically a portion of the programming code induced into the software of an application or the operating system of an organization that is triggered on a specific time period or by some triggering action of it. The nature of Logic Bombs is basically malicious, and they act same as a virus or a Trojan horse when activated by the triggering action. All those viruses that are to be released at some triggering action also fall into the category of a logic bomb (Parsons, Oja and Low, 1999). An organization applications and database are always vulnerable to such attacks. As the data represent the most critical factor for any organization, most of the applications that are being used are there to perform the operations and keep the data in an organized manner (Venkatraman, 2003). When such an attack is planted on data, nobody knows to what extent it may damage the organization because such an attack may not only destroy the data on the hard disks of the individual user, but may be planted to destroy the data kept in the servers. It may be planted to cover some financial frauds by some individual or a group of individuals, because when records are destroyed, they cannot be held responsible for anything. It may be planted on the application program by some cranky that runs the production unit. That may change the recipe, and the mixing of the raw materials to generate the final project; that is also financially not suitable for the organization. It will clearly mean that the end product made by this is a waste and it will hit the company badly because it will increase the wasted products amount (Brenner, 2010). Signs of Logic Bomb Attack Parsons, Oja and Low (1999) mentioned in their book that sometimes it is very easy to detect a logic bomb attack, especially if it is a virus attack on the network of an organization. Nowadays, most of the organizations have up to date systems that are there to detect these attacks. But when this is in form of an attack on the data to manipulate the data at some certain point of time in a way that may be beneficial for an individual at some certain point of time, then it is very difficult to detect. There have been such attacks by employees of an organization on the organizational data that were very difficult to detect, they were traced very late and cost the company millions of dollars. One such example may be given of a lady banker, who used to transfer only one penny of every transaction to some account of hers, and in the end was able to extract hundreds of thousands of dollars to her account. Bank’s systems were not able to trace the one penny fraud on every transaction and it was later reported by some customer who used to keep record of his every penny and he reported that some one or two hundred dollars are missing from his account over a period of 12 months. At this point when thorough investigation was made then she was caught and dealt with, but you never know how many one penny frauds like this have been going around you in your organization as these are very difficult to catch (Parsons, Oja and Low, 1999). If it is an attack by some hacker on the data then it is very easy to detect, because the data will be missing and no reports on that data will be generated, but frauds like the above mentioned are very difficult to find out and may take months, if not years to detect. Same is the case with the fiddling with the application software intentionally or un-intentionally. As there have been such cases that there was some malicious code/bug in the application that calculate the end bill of customers but if it doesn’t charge the customer for certain events/products that the customer has used/purchased, then it will be very difficult to get to (Brenner, 2010). Preventions and Preventive Measures from Logic Bomb Attacks There are different types of logic bomb attacks as discussed in the above paragraphs. Prevention from the most common of these like viruses etc is comparatively easy to handle than those in form of malicious codes and data destruction type of attacks. In order to be protected against virus attacks, the company should keep its systems safe by using up-to-date and state of the art preventive software. They should buy the full support agreement, so that in case of any such incident it should have someone to blame on and it should sue someone to get back what it lost. The systems should be scheduled for health check along with malicious attacks on daily basis. There should be a proper network infrastructure developed in a way that these could be handled as soon as there is a sign of any such attack or issue. The systems administrators should be vigilant enough to foresee such issues, and also should be held responsible in case of a simple mistake. So the solution to such attacks is vigilant system incorporation. System here means the combination of state of the art detection software, along with experienced and capable staff to monitor them (Wehrum 2009). For preventing the accidental code in some application program that runs the application, it is important to have complete understanding from the vendor. It should be properly tested on the test environment. The test environment should be properly deployed with the knowledge of all the scenarios that may be encountered in the future. These scenarios should be tested thoroughly and vigilantly with keeping track of each and everything in documents, as there are many templates available. There are many guidelines of these found so these should be used and it should be taken and deployed in a very systematically way to avoid any malfunction in the future. As sometimes there are bugs left in the end product and these could only be identified when end users runs it. Therefore, the involvement of the end users during such testing is necessary, as they are the ones that may help in a better way in order to extract any bugs left, because it’s better to catch it there and then rather leaving it till the end (Parsons, Oja and Low, 1999). In some cases, when some angry employee plants something in the code or the system, it is the most difficult case to handle. As the case of intrusion attacks, virus attacks hacking attempts should be handled as per the earlier discussions. To avoid such cases, there should be a strict password policy implementation. It should be made a habit that whenever an employee who knows passwords to certain servers and applications leaves the company passwords to those should be immediately changed. The Access Controls Lists (ACL) should be strictly maintained. Access to the systems, databases and servers should be maintained by these ACLs. Each and every operation should be logged and the access/maintenance to that log should be kept very secretively and in the form of hidden or encrypted form (Venkatraman, 2003). That brings to our other preventive method that the information should be given to someone on only the need to know basis. Need to know basis is the best policy in order to prevent such attacks. The team structures is very critical in this regard, because when you don’t give access to change data to the application engineers then it gets very easy to maintain this policy. As if they want any change in data, they will have to raise it to those data keepers about that, and this will automatically log that change as he raised it with some internal process to that guy who can change it with special approvals and this way fiddling with data can be prevented and any small change to it has to process through many layers. But in the end, it all comes to the individuals and the company should have to adopt such policies that no one should even bother to think of making any such drastic measures and all this can be obtained by the above discussed possibilities (Parsons, Oja and Low, 1999). References Brenner, W.S. (2010). Cybercrime: criminal threats from cyberspace- Crime, media, and popular culture. United Stated: ABC-CLIO. Parsons, J.J., Oja, D. & Low, S. (1999). Computers, technology, and society: New perspectives series. Edition 2. Virginia: Course Technology. Potts, S.J. (2002). Computer security: a bibliography with indexes. Hauppauge: Nova Publishers. Venkatraman, A. (2003). Cyber Crime. Technology. Retrieved from http://www.arjunvenkatraman.com/work/techno/cybercrime.html Wehrum, K. (2009). Technology: When IT worker attacks- How to prevent tech sabotage. Network Security. Retrieved from http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/technology-when-it-workers-attack.html Read More