Treatment of Cybercrime - Coursework Example

Cyber Crime Nowadays, the most alarming and critical technological threat to today’s world isCyber Crime. I will try to discuss the fact that although the awareness level of citizens against cyber crimes is increasing day by day, and the statistics are has shown that they are now trying to protect themselves against the long lasting trauma of cyber crime. Nonetheless, studies over the recent years have indicated that such crimes have increased more rapidly not only in Canada but also across the globe as well. Since few decades, development of internet and computer technology has revolutionized the world upside down. It has been able to attract every single person or group from a teenager to a schoolteacher, to an ordinary businessperson to CEOs of multinational companies, from governments to international agencies, and from public to private sectors. Keeping the exaggeration aside, the astonishing scope of these powerful tools has changed the way of doing communication and business, quickening the way up to the world globalization (Broadhurst, pp. 1-4). The development and convergence of high technology computer systems and information technology have provided innumerable advantages to this world. However, with these greater benefits, we have become vulnerable against many cyber criminals that are present across the world. With these risks, it is evident that internet security is not only the concern of computer wizards but also the concern of every single person engaged with this splendid technology, with this cyber crime has become a real threat to the world’s internet security. Cyber crime is the crime or any malicious and wrongful activity targeted at a computer or a computer system (Stephenson, pp. 03). Cyber crime is the vicious and condemnable usage of any computer system or any computer network in the world of internet. This misuse is followed by attack or misuse against the computer systems for reprehensible objectives and condemnable aims; abuses and crimes from existing crooks using advanced technology; or the advancement of new abuses, and offensive crimes that have arisen with the development and growth of internet (Savona, pp. 33). Cyber Crimes have been categorized into two different classes. Firstly, cyber crime has been associated with utilization of computer system or network as a target or as a tool. The second way to classify cyber crime is the way used by FBI in preventing and fights against the cyber crimes. This method involves using a profiling approach to differentiate between the ones who are outsiders and those who are insiders. The term Cyber Crime is a wide umbrella encompassing different modes of committing such crime, threatening internet security. The different crimes involve Email Bombing, which is done by sending innumerable emails to a person or an organization that result in an account or system crash. On 20 December 2009, an individual spammed GrameenPhone with over 4500 emails that resulted in loss of information of the company. (PC Magazine, 2009) Information theft includes theft of the personal and private information that is present in electronic form (disks storage, computer memory etc). This is achieved by either approaching the data by physical means or accessing it secretly through any virtual medium. In January 2000, a hacker Maxim displayed more than 300,000 credit card numbers on its website by breaking CDUniverse.com. Later on, he exacted a ransom of $100,000 as a price of deletion of that displayed data. ‘Data diddling’ (Kumar, pp. 39-46) is an attack that involves changing the random and raw data before it is processed and then changing it again after the completion of the process. Salami Attacks (Kumar, pp. 39-46) are the crimes committed under the intention of causing a financial breakthrough in financial organizations. Service Denial attacks are happened when the computer of the target is overflowed with the requests more than it can process resulting in system crash. Another most common type of denial of service attack is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), in a criminal attack offenders are innumerable and are distributed widely. Viruses are the malicious programs that connect itself to a computer or a particular file or directory in a computer system; it results in the damage caused by deletion of those or alteration of those files. A virus named as Love Bug Virus affected a minimum of 5% of the computer systems across the globe, resulting in losses more than $10 billion. However, worms do not connect them to the files unlike viruses; they keep preparing functional copies of until they occupy all the free space in a memory. In the year 2006, almost 6,000,000 cases of virus were reported and the number of arrested cyber criminals under the light of these reports was only 100. (Kumar, pp. 59-66) Logic bombs are the programs that solely depends on a particular case, these programs execute when that particular case or event occurs. The most famous logic bomb was Michelangelo in 1992 that resulted in enormous devastation in terms of finance and security. (Stephenson, pp. 50-54) Trojan attacks are done with the help of fake authorized programs that takes charge of the computer and monitors every activity by fake representation of an authorized program. The most common medium for Trojan horses is the email. A Trojan named as BBB affected computers of 1400 prominent business executive (Borhanuddin, pp. 05). Web jacking is an attack where the hacker gets control or administrative access to websites of others. The hacker can cut up or change the information or data displayed on that website. The goldfish case is a victim of web jacking, when the data at the goldfish website was changed and the hackers exacted a ransom of $1 million. In February 1999, a group of hackers hacked MoD Skynet military satellite and did a considerable damage to the ministry of defense. Although the Computer Crime Unit of Scotland Yard and the US Air Force put their heads together for the cause but no one was taken to custody even as a suspect. (Stephenson, pp. 56-59) In many a cases, the offenders have harassed people by gaining access to their personal information, pictures, or email etc. This can be done by cyber stalking or password sniffing; cyber stalking is observing a person’s activities on the internet and password sniffing is to copy or get access to a person’s password from his personal computer system. About 1.944,000 cases of online black making and threatening were reported during the year 2008 in UK while almost 90% of the cyber harassment crimes are not reported. This implies that out of 100% cases, the reported 1,944,000 cases were only the 10% (UK Crime Report, 2008) Another very critical and offensive abuse of internet is the Pornography or the public exposure of detestable and offensive material. Time statistics have shown that every second, $3,075,64 is expended on pornography, 26,258 internet users are watching pornography, and 372 Internet users write pornographic terms in search bar of the search engines. After every 39 minutes, a porn movie is made in the UK. (UK Crime Report, 2008) Every single person who takes part in growth of pornography over internet is a part of it. From owning the websites having obscene material to the mean that are helpful or are used in making or creating these materials, from taking part in these activities to watching these materials, and the transfer of this material from the websites to one’s own system from the internet are the various forms of development of pornography on the internet. They cause considerable damage to the society especially the youth by corrupting their minds and leaving them with no constructive approach in their minds. Only in 2003, there were 260 million pornographic website present on internet (Sridhar, vol. 28). Another very alarming cyber crime is online fraud and cheating. Over the years, it has proved itself as one of the most remunerative business developing on internet. It is of different forms as abusing others on the name of online jobs, lottery, cash prizes, credit card crimes, signing contracts etc. In the year 2006, about 92,000 cases of online fraud were reported in UK and 40% of all the identity cheat crimes were online. In 2007 the no of online financial cheating cases were double than the looting or theft cases in UK. (UK Crime Report, 2008) The losses and damage caused by these cyber crimes have increased the concerns of all internet users to have a secure and safe internet connection. People are now aware of the disastrous consequences there carelessness can cause them. They are well aware of the importance of new emerging issues in this regard. It has been experienced antivirus does not really help much in preventing cyber crimes. The use of Intrusion detection system, to detect the criminal activities over cyber space, has increased in recent years. An increased trend of using firewall is observed within the last few years, to block or resist the unwanted and unauthorized access from internet. Usage of anti-spyware programs has remarkably increased as the threats of cyber crimes has increased over the years. There are a few Intrusion detection systems that are well known for their ability to prevent cyber crimes as well. People are aware that there are government agencies that are helpful in this regard and they can report the frauds and defraud cases to those agencies on which they would take further action. Many times, cyber crimes go unnoticed and untraced but the idea of cyber police has reduced this irony largely. In UK, only 10% of the cyber crimes are reported and instead of this fact, the number is far beyond the imaginations (UK Crime report, 2008). Another important issue is the emersion of multi users system that is solely dependent on passwords. (Fafinski, pp. 47-48) Studies have proved that people do change their passwords every now and then to prevent from any password theft. Usage of email filters has also increased; it helps in keeping a check at the incoming emails and deletes or bans any suspicious activity automatically. This results in prevention from bombing or spoofing largely. Encryption is also emerged as a valuable tool for prevention against cyber crimes over the years; it is the way to secure data by changing into an understandable form, which is almost impossible to interpret without having the right key. Encryption gives rise to increased security when documents are being sent by emails, eradicating the worst fear of information theft or stealing. One of the most important jobs in networking organizations is to hunt down all the possible loopholes, putting the network security to risk. So organizations are concerned about their network security, running a decreased security risk and taking every possible measurement to prevent from being a victim of cyber crime. (Fafinski, pp. 49-52) Many users prefer to do safe surfing, knowing the risks of being careless, they keep their personal information private and safe, browse and download from safe sites, accept data or information from recognized sources and hence minimizing the threat. UN, World Bank, IMF, EU, CoE, etc provide training to members of cyber police convention and awareness programs have been set up to increase public awareness with respect to prevention against cyber crimes and cyber space offenders. (Gercke, pp. 70-74) Citizens have started reporting cyber crimes to the cyber police or other related authorities because now they know they would never get rid of the devastation of cyber crimes unless they report it. However, the fact is, in spite of all the security measurement and prevention cyber crimes are increasing drastically in Canada and across the globe. The Times columnist Victoria says that in Canada citizens are more prone to cyber crime as that of street crime and this is an unfortunate thing for a well-established country like Canada. Canada happens to be the sole G8 country having no jurisdiction for spam. Cyber criminals are doing 105 billion per year business across the globe and it still is increasing rapidly. Almost 95% of Canadians think that they have been offended by cyber crime once in their lives. In about three years, there is a rapid increment of 1239% of hacked computer systems in Canada. (PC Magazine, 2009) However, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Call Centre is playing a crucial role in tackling different types of cyber crimes in the country. In addition, a collaborative effort is being put with the help of Canadian law-enforcement agencies and the Federal Competition Bureau, which will allow reducing such crimes in the future. (CBC News, 2007) According to Australian Institute of Criminology 2007 report, the computer system abuse has been increased from 25% to 35% in three years (AIC, 2007). In UK, the rate of cyber crime increased by 16.7% from 2005-2006, which is very alarming with reference to internet security and citizens’ safeguard. According to IC3 , for the year of 2008, 66% percent cyber crimes were initiated and developed in 66%, 11% found had thee roots in United Kingdom, followed by Nigeria with 7.5%, accompanied by Canada 3% and China with 1.6% (BBC). In Belgium, these crimes increased by 45 percent in the year 2005 as compared to 2004. The financial loss US suffered from cyber criminals increased to $264.59 million for the year of 2008 from $17.80 million in the year 2001 (IC3 Annual Report, 2009). The sudden, drastic, and rapid growth of cyber crime and online offenders on internet has paved the way for devastating losses and unpredictably worst outcomes not only in Canada but also around the globe. It has taken the capability of the victims or targets to resist the threats, challenge the risks, and operate their businesses while having a good control of their assets. In addition, over the years these victimizations have increased exponentially, it can be predicted that with the advent of more advance technology and with the emergence of more modern tools this exploitation would only increase as the tools of cyber offenders would become more advanced. One of the examples of such role of technology is innovative solutions by a Seattle-based company, Cogneto that has been able to create biometric solutions for efficient identification of users, in order to avoid cyber crooks. (CBC News, 2007) Though many precautionary measurements, counter techniques and prevention tools has been developed with time, but in front of increasing cyber space crimes all the efforts seem to go astray. Cyber crime is the constant threat and terror for the lifetime of any organization prevailing in this global era. However, there is still a hope for everyone in the cyber world that the advent of new technology not only provides loopholes for criminals to get in and opportunities to spin the world on their fingertips. But it also facilitate the law enforcement and counter cyber crimes unit with new challenges and chances, to eradicate this cyber evil from our society and heal the world from victimization from cyber offenders. The need of this distressful time is to continue learning the lesson from the losses, improving and refining our input to this internet world and implement the knowledge we seek to prevent crime and may be one day we would be able to eliminate this deadly evil from our society. Conclusively, I have tried to discuss some of the significant aspects of cyber crime. It is hoped that my findings will be beneficial for students, teachers, and professionals in better understanding of the topic. Works Cited BBC News Americas. Cyber-crime rising, report warns. Retrieved on May 1, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7973886.stm Borhanuddin, A.R.M. Cyber Crime and Bangladesh Perspective. Department of Law Dhaka University, 2008. Broadhurst, Roderic. Cyber-Crime: The Challenge in Asia. Hong Kong University Press, 2005. CBC News. Is Canada losing the Fight against Online Thieves? Retrieved on may 01, 2009; http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/online-crime-war.html CBC News. News in Depth: Identity Crisis in Cyberspace. Retrieved on May 01, 2009; http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/cyber-crime-id.html Consumer Fraud Reporting. Consumer Fraud Reporting Crime Statistics. Retrieved on May 1, 2009. http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/internet_scam_statistics.htm Fafinski, Stefan. UK CYBERCRIME REPORT 2008.1871 Limited, 2008. Gercke, Dr. Marco. Legal Foundation and Enforcement Fundamentals. Cologne University, 2008. Harris, Shon. CISSP All-in-One Exam Guide. McGraw-Hill Professional, 2007. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2331225,00.asp Kumar, V. Shiva. Cyber Crime – Prevention & detection. A.P.Police Academy, 2006. PC Magazine, 10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes Retrieved on May 1, 2009. Savona, Ernesto Ugo. Crime and technology: new frontiers for regulation, law enforcement, and research. Springer, 2004. Stephenson, Peter. Investigating computer-related crime. CRC Press, 1999. Questionnaire Have you ever got affected from any cyber crime? How did you get affected? Did you report yourself to any cyber police or such organizations? Do you use any tool to prevent from cyber crime now? Read More