COMPUTER CRIME
Computer crime, or cybercrime, refers to any crime that involves a computer and a network. The computer may have been used in the commission of a crime, or it may be the target.
Netcrime refers, more precisely, to criminal exploitation of the Internet. Issues surrounding this type of crime have become high-profile, particularly those surrounding hacking, copyright infringement, child pornography, and child grooming. There are also problems of privacy and confidential information is lost or intercepted, lawfully or otherwise.
TYPES OF COMPUTER CRIMES
Distributed denial of service attacks rank among the most widely reported cyber-crimes. They first appeared in mid-1999 and are relatively easy to perpetrate. Many of the tools required to carry them off are freely available online. Often, DDS attack networks consist of hundreds of compromised systems. The attacker inaugurates the attack sequence from one or more consoles, and it can affect thousands of systems worldwide.
Virus programs infect computer files by inserting copies of themselves into those files; they are spread from host to host when users transmit infected files by e-mail, over the Internet, across a company's network, or by disk. Related problems include worms, which can travel within a computer or network without a user transmitting files; trojan horses, which are disguised as innocuous files but which, once activated, can steal users' login names and passwords, thus facilitating identity theft; and logic bombs, programs activated by a specific event.
Other widely publicized computer crimes involved online fraud, such as stock scams and securities fraud via the Internet. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which receives about 300 complaints a day concerning online scams, devotes one-fourth of its enforcement staff to computer-related offenses. Theft of online content also is common. A Software & Information Industry Association study maintained that one-third of all business software applications in use in 1999 were pirated copies. And the Internet has made the distribution of information obtained in identity thefts, such as a person's name or social security number, much quicker and easier. The dissemination of child pornography online also has garnered widespread public and law-enforcement attention. Other offenses, such as stalking victims via the Internet, have only recently begun to be addressed.
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