Chronics of Cyber Crime Complaint Center in the United Arab Emirates - Case Study Example

Cyber Crime Complaint Center (in United Arab Emirates) Where globalization has brought advancements in our life, there has come number of problems along with it as well. The cyber crime is the bitter reality of this advancement. Though the technology has made our basic work much easier but it has made the information more vulnerable too. Now more of the time and cost is spent on making the data secure rather than performing the main functions of the businesses. Since all of the information is now stored over the internet therefore it has also become much more important to maintain the security of the information else it may collapse the complete organization. Hacking, Malware, Fraud, Identity theft, Information warfare, phishing scams, viruses, cyber stalking are some of the examples of the cyber crime that are discussed most today. (Dwyer, P., 2010, p. 3). Usually the large organizations become the victim of cyber-crime because either the hackers are more interested in the financial gain or they want to attain the prestige by getting access illegally to their secret data. Additionally the countries where there is unemployment are also at more risk of cyber crime like in some of the countries where there are youngsters holding degrees but having no jobs gets annoyed and their mind starts moving towards the criminal activities. They are well qualified so can easily learn hacking and scamming and thus for the financial gain they gets indulged into such crimes. According to the statistics of 2008 to 2009 it is found that the financial fraud via cyber is doubled. As the cyber criminal activities have increased much so there is a need for the organizations to consider on the internal skills and structure. If the structure is strong then the risks of attacks are also minimized because about 60% of the cyber criminal activities are being played from inside the organization. Due to this loophole majority of the organizations get failed to deal with the cyber crime as there is either improper structure or lack of knowledge and expertise. Since now there have lots of researches being carried out on the topic of cyber crimes. The research articles with the latest information are published in International Journal of Cyber Criminology. There are number of books by Wall, Jewkes, McQuade and Yar have been written on this topic. Still as this research topic is fresh so the depth study is required as mentioned in the recent work of Nhan and Bachmann (2010). The cyber crime increases as the growth of internet connectivity increases in any area and as we know that the new technology is wholly dependent upon the internet so the growth of internet connectivity is rapidly increasing in every area of the world. Higgins, G. (2010) discussed the challenges and threats due to increasing cybercrime to the economy and the businesses. The best example of the rapid growth of internet connections is United Arab Emirates where the broadband connection charges are very low therefore majority people are making use of it and establishing online businesses. According to statistics and that mentioned by Dwyer, P. (2010) and Kshetri, N. (2010), the internet use in Middle East has been increased up to 920.2% from 2000 to 2007 whereas in rest of the world it has been increased up to 259.6% only. But these new users of internet in Middle East do not have much awareness about how to control the cyber crime. That’s why majority businesses get big losses due to cyber crimes and because of these losses faced by the UAE, they have started thinking over to control these crimes. For this purpose they have established cyber crime courts and computer emergency response team (aeCERT). According to the Al Arabiya News Channel, Ajbaili (2011): “Saudi Arabia was ranked first and United Arab Emirates second, as the most vulnerable of the Gulf countries to fall victims to Cyber crimes, such as website hacking, according to a statistics report recently published by Trend Micro” The Middle East financial institutions and other businesses claim that they have the most expensive security system that hackers cannot break but still the financial experts say about the financial institutes of UAE that they lost more than one billion dollars in just few past years because of the cyber crimes mentioned in Guindy, M. (2008). One of the examples is Al Jazeera that was being hacked and got loss. Then Dubai eGovernment and Dubai International Finance Center were also being attacked by cyber crime. Due to these increased cyber crimes in UAE, the impression of it is also getting spoiled all over the world. This results in bad economy because the international businesses hesitate to deal with the UAE organizations fearing the insecure systems. It is therefore very important to control the cyber crimes as soon as possible. The other reason of the increasing cyber crimes in United Arab Emirates is that they don’t have information security awareness. At the time when they are establishing the businesses they don’t really care much regarding the implementation of security solutions. Their main emphasis is over the business and not over the security (Guindy, M., 2008, p. 16). But actually the first preference should always be given to the security. When setting up the broadband or WiFi connection then this thing must be considered importantly that either Internet Service Provider is making a reliable and secure setup or not? One must think over it that why the other developed countries like US and Europe don’t have such increased number of cyber crimes as compared to the UAE? This is because the people are unaware of the information security programs in UAE! Secondly majority security awareness programs are translated in English that’s why people are unable to understand. United Arab Emirates is not only unaware of the high security programs but they are unaware of the simple phishing too. The political and religious issues are on hype in these areas so the hackers scam the people using these terms. Like they send malware that asks the client to open an email with an attachment containing information about political or religious issues but actually it is scam. Therefore considering such low level knowledge of the UAE people, it is important that the Government must arrange for security awareness programs. The UAE Telecommunication Regulatory Authority has taken important measures to deal with the increased number of cyber crimes by establishing computer emergency response team. The goal of this team is to provide security awareness to the businesses, children, individuals and organizations. It also serves the law enforcement authorities and government and helps to develop new legislation and providing cyber safety. Its aim is to develop a nationwide center that will disseminate the latest information about the viruses, threats and vulnerabilities. In addition to the telecommunication regulatory authority services, Abu Dhabi Police which is responsible for the primary law enforcement in UAE has also been putting efforts to ensure cyber crime free environment. The main goals of AD police are to enforce criminal law, maintain peace and improve safety of the people all over. Though these efforts of UAE Government are very impressive but the problem with these two departments is that the victims cannot be easily able to connect for the complaint registration. It requires long procedures to submit any one complaint. However the system that we are going to present will help the people to save time and register the complaint in just few minutes. They can easily connect via phone or web and submit the application. The Cyber crime is one of biggest issues that every country is dealing with. USA, UK & Europe have taken very useful measures to control the cyber crimes. The software like Ironkey for the online banking security and number of other useful software were applied in the organizations. They also established awareness programs regarding information security and enforced laws for cyber crime. USA, founded internet fraud complaint center in 2000 that lately changed with the name Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2003 was established by partnership between National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Later UK, Germany and Canada also established the centers like IC3 to control the cyber crime in the country. Internet Crime Complaint Center was basically developed to deal with the cyber crimes at the internet. The main aims of IC3 are to provide the victims an easy ways to submit their application and let the regulatory authorities be aware of the suspected violence. It provides the central position for the submission of complaints so that this information can later be used to publish the yearly reports regarding the latest trends. This system provides the clients to post their application online at www.ic3.gov. Thus the website collects all the complaints and stores them in the database. Then the application is sent to the concerned authority after being analyzed. The authorities then go through the application and contact the victim regarding the case. In this way it becomes easier for the victim to get response of its application. IC3 has brought incredible change in the percentage of economic loss due to cyber crime and also made the law enforcement easier for the local, state and federal agencies. Since people in UAE don’t have much information about the cyber-crime. Therefore it is important to take action in prior. Secondly because of the long procedures victims get back without submitting an application against the cyber crime. Considering the situation of UAE, we decided to develop a Cyber Crime Complaint Center. Using this system, the victims will be able to easily get their cyber crime complaint recorded. Then it will process the information provided by the victim and locate the probable cyber criminals. After collecting information about the suspected criminals, this information will be forwarded to the authorities. This system will be responsible of notifying the regulatory agencies about the violation of the cyber laws so that the law enforcement can be made. This system will receive complaints related to any cyber crime like whether it is violation of Intellectual Property Rights, Economic Espionage, and Computer Intrusions, Online money transactions and Identity theft or so on. Cyber Crime Complaint Center has an additional feature in comparison with the Internet Crime Complaint Center that it allows the clients to register their complaint via call center. Apart from the ease for the victim regarding the submission of complaint via phone or web there is another benefit of this system that is it will keep the record of all the cyber criminals and the kind of cyber crimes that have been made in UAE. So by this method it will be easy to develop such anti cyber crime software that can protect the online users from the viruses, malwares and so on. Additionally the most important thing is that it will make law enforcement easier. For establishing this system we will be required to first develop a secure database that will hold the data regarding the cyber crimes, infected websites, scammed emails and criminals. Thus we can easily have a look at the yearly reports of crimes. The database will be secure enough that hackers will not be able to easily break the password. Then we will be required to develop the website which will collect data from the clients. The call center will also be organized for the collection of complaints. The call center and the website will then be linked with the database via interface. After designing the secure infrastructure, we will develop the link with the regulatory authorities. Here is the mechanism of the Cyber Crime Complaint Center: The general process will be carried out like this; first when the complainer will place a complaint via phone or web, the file will open and unique number will be assigned for the complaint and sent via SMS to the complainer. Then this file number will be stored in the database and the complaint. After analysis the complaint is sent to the concerned department that looks into the details and then updates the complainer directly. Thus this cycle will keep the complainer in loop during the complete process. For the development of this system we will first focus on the database creation that will take 2 weeks. Then we will link this database with different departments and will program which complaint should go to which department. This will take 3 weeks to cover every department and complaints. In last we will design the connection between the complainer and the database and the concerned department. 3 days will be required to give it a final look. The cyber crime complaint center is better than the internet crime complaint center in a way that it offers the facility of call center to the clients as well but the IC3 do not offer this facility. Now the clients with cyber crime complaint center can more easily register their complaint against any kind of crime or problem they receive at an internet. So because of an ease more people will register their complaints and thus various kinds of crimes will be stored in the database that will help the system to become more secure. We collected our data for this project by means of journals, latest updates at the blogs, newspapers and books. We also discussed it with other students who previously worked on this project and also interviewed Captain Omer Mohammad al Teneiji, Director of Cyber Crime Branch and Colonel (Dr.) Rashid Bu Rasheed, head of Organized Crime Section. References Kshetri, N. (2010). The Global Cyber Crime Industry. London, New York: Springer Brenner, S. (2010). Cyber Crime. Criminal Threats from Cyberspace. United States of America: Greenwood Publishing Group Wall, D. (2007). Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the information age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press Higgins, G. (2010). Cybercrime: An Introduction to an Emerging Phenomenon. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Jaishankar, K. (2010). The Future of Cyber Criminology: Challenges and Opportunities, 3, 4. Alkaabi, A. (2010). Combating Computer Crime: An International Perspective, 54. Dwyer, P. (2010). Cyber Crime in the Middle East, 3, 4. Guindy, M. (2008). Cyber Crime in the Middle East, 16, 17. Stair, R. & Reynolds, G. (2011). Fundamentals of Information Systems. USA: Cengage Ross, J. (2010). Criminal Investigations: Cybercrime. New York: Infobase Publishing. Mehan, J. (2008). Cyber War, Cyber Terror, Cyber Crime. UK: IT Governance Publishing. Blythe, S. (2011). E-Commerce Law around the World. United States of America: Xlibris Corporation. Yar, M. (2006). Cybercrime and Society: SAGE Publications. Schiller, J. (2010). Cyber Attacks and Protection. United States of America: Emilie Ajbaili, M. (2009). Saudi & UAE at high risk to cyber-crime: report: Al Arabiya News. Nhan, J., Bachmann, M. (2010). Cyber Criminology: Exploring Internet Crimes and Criminal Behaviour. CRC Press. Read More