About Cyber Crime:
Cybercrime, also known as computer crime, is the illegal use of a computer to further illegal ends such as fraud, trafficking in child pornography and intellectual property, stealing identities, or violating privacy. Cybercrime, particularly through the Internet, has grown in importance as computers have become more important in commerce, entertainment, and government. Cybercrime, particularly through the Internet, has grown in importance as computers have become more important in commerce, entertainment, and government.
Because of the early and widespread adoption of computers and the Internet in the United States, the majority of the first cybercrime victims and perpetrators were Americans. By the twenty-first century, however, there was hardly a hamlet left in the world who had not been touched by some form of cybercrime.
Cybercrime Definition:
New technologies open up new criminal opportunities, but only a few new types of crime. What makes cybercrime distinct from other types of crime?? The use of a digital computer is one obvious distinction, but technology alone is insufficient to distinguish between different types of criminal activity. Criminals do not need a computer to commit fraud, traffic in child pornography and intellectual property, steal identities, or violate people's privacy. All of these activities existed prior to the term "cyber."
`Cybercrime, particularly that involving the Internet, is an extension of existing criminal behavior as well as some novel illegal activities..
The vast majority of cybercrime involves an attack on personal, corporate, or government data. Although the attacks do not target physical bodies, they do target personal or corporate virtual bodies, which are the collection of informational characteristics that define people and institutions on the Internet. To put it another way, Our virtual identities are essential elements of everyday life in the digital age: we are a collection of numbers and identifiers stored in multiple computer databases owned by governments and corporations. Cybercrime emphasize the importance of networked computers in our lives, as well as the vulnerability of seemingly solid facts like individual identity.
The nonlocal nature of cybercrime is significant: actions can occur in jurisdictions separated by vast distances. This creates significant difficulties for law enforcement because previously local or even national crimes now necessitate international cooperation. For example, For example, if a person views child pornography on a computer in a country where it is not illegal, is that person committing a crime in another country? such materials are prohibited? Where exactly does cybercrime occur? Cyberspace is simply a more developed version of the space in which a telephone conversation occurs, somewhere between the two people having the conversation. As a global network, the Internet provides criminals with numerous hiding places both in the real world and within the network itself. However, just as people walking on the ground leave tracks that a skilled tracker can follow, cybercriminals, despite their best efforts to hide their tracks, leave clues as to their identity and location. However, in order to track such clues across national borders, international cybercrime treaties must be ratified.
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| Cyber Bullying / Cyber Stalking |
In 1996, the Council of Europe drafted a preliminary international treaty on computer crime with government representatives from the United States, Canada, and Japan. Civil libertarian groups around the world immediately protested treaty provisions requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to store information on their customers' transactions and turn this information over on demand. Nonetheless, work on the treaty continued, and on November 23, 2001, the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime was signed by 30 states. The convention took effect in 2004. Additional protocols were proposed in 2002 and went into effect in 2006, covering terrorist activities as well as racist and xenophobic cybercrimes. Furthermore, several national laws, such as the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, have increased law enforcement's ability to monitor and protect computer networks.
Cyber Crime Types:
Cybercrime encompasses a wide range of activities. At one end of the spectrum are crimes involving fundamental violations of personal or corporate privacy, such as attacks on the integrity of information held in digital depositories and the use only of illegally obtained digital information to blackmail a company or individual. Identity theft is another growing crime at this end of the spectrum. Transaction-based crimes include fraud, trafficking in child pornography, digital piracy, money laundering, and counterfeiting. These are specific crimes with specific victims, but the criminal hides behind the Internet's relative anonymity. Individuals within corporations or government bureaucracies are also involved in this type of crime. Changing data on purpose for financial or political gain At the other end of the spectrum are crimes involving attempts to disrupt the operation of the Internet itself. These range from spam, hacking, and denial of service attacks against specific websites to cyberterrorism—the use of the Internet to cause public disruption and even death. The use of the Internet by nonstate actors to disrupt a country's economic and technological infrastructure is referred to as cyberterrorism. Public awareness of the threat of cyberterrorism has grown dramatically since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
1. Invasion of privacy and identity theft:
Cybercrime affects both virtual and physical bodies, but the effects vary. This phenomenon is most visible in cases of identity theft. Individuals in the United States, for example, have a Social Security number rather than an official identity card, which has long served as a de facto identification number. Taxes are collected using each citizen's Social Security number, and many private institutions use the number to track employees, students, and patients. Access to a person's Social Security number allows you to gather all of the documents related to that person's citizenship, allowing you to steal his identity. Even stolen credit card information can be used to re-create a person's identity. When criminals steal a company's credit card records, they have two distinct outcomes. First, they steal digital information about individuals that can be used in a variety of ways. For example, they could use the credit card information to rack up massive bills, causing the credit card companies to suffer significant losses, or they could sell the information to others who could use it in a similar manner. Second, they may use personal credit card numbers to create new identities for other criminals. As an example, consider a criminal. If you have a stolen credit card, you should contact the issuing bank and change the mailing address on the account. The criminal may then obtain a passport or driver's license bearing his own picture but bearing the victim's name. The criminal can easily obtain a new Social Security card with a driver's license; The victim's credit record and background are then used to open bank accounts and receive loans. The original cardholder may be completely unaware of this until the debt has grown so large that the bank contacts the account holder. Only then is the identity theft revealed. Although identity theft occurs in many countries, researchers and law enforcement officials are hampered by a global lack of information and statistics on the crime. However, cybercrime is clearly a global issue.
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| Cyber Crime Hacking, Identity theft |
The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released an identity theft report in 2015; the previous year, nearly 1.1 million Americans had their identities used fraudulently to open bank, credit card, or utility accounts. According to the report, another 16.4 million Americans were victims of account theft, which included the use of stolen credit cards and ATM cards. According to the BJS report, while the total number of identity theft victims in the United States has increased by about 1 million since 2012, the total loss incurred by individuals has decreased by about $10 billion to $15.4 billion since 2012. The majority of that drop was due to a sharp decrease in the number of people losing more than $2,000. The majority of identities. Small sums were stolen, with losses of less than $300 accounting for 54% of the total.
2. Internet swindle
There are several techniques to fool people on the Internet. The Nigerian, or "419," scam is one of the most well-known; the number refers to the portion of Nigerian legislation that the scam breaches. Although this trick has been employed with both fax and traditional mail, the Internet has given it fresh life. An individual in the scheme receives an e-mail claiming that the sender needed assistance in transferring a huge sum of money out of Nigeria or another foreign nation. Typically, this amount is in the form of a saleable asset, such as oil, or a significant sum of cash that requires "washing" to conceal its source; the variants are unlimited, and new specifications are continuously being devised. The message requests that the recipient cover some of the costs of transporting the monies out of the nation in exchange for a considerably larger quantity of amount in the near future. If the recipient responds with a check or money order, he is informed that issues have arisen and that further funds are required. Victims may lose hundreds of dollars over time that are completely irrecoverable.
The newly founded United States Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) claimed in 2002 that more than $54 million had been stolen through various fraud schemes, a threefold rise over anticipated losses of $17 million in 2001. Annual losses increased in successive years, reaching $125 million in 2003, over $200 million in 2006, nearly $250 million in 2008, and more than $1 billion in 2015. In the United States, the most common type of fraud is "non-payment/non-delivery," in which products and services are either delivered but not paid for or paid for but not delivered. In contrast to identity theft, which occurs without the victim's knowledge, these more classic types of fraud occur in plain sight. Because the victim voluntarily supplies private information that facilitates the crime, these are transactional crimes. Few individuals would believe someone who approached them on the street and promised them quick money; nevertheless, getting an unsolicited e-mail or browsing a random Web page is enough dissimilar that many people readily open their wallets. Despite extensive consumer education, Internet fraud remains a lucrative business for criminals and prosecutors. Europe and the United States are not the only places where cybercrime occurs. South Korea is one of the world's most wired countries, and cybercrime fraud numbers are rising at an alarming rate. Similar crimes have also increased rapidly in Japan. Quill Bot is going to rewrite your text. Start typing or copying something here, then press the Enter button.
3. ATM Robbery:
Computers also enable more mundane sorts of fraud. Consider the automated teller machine (ATM), which is currently used by many people to obtain cash. A card and personal identification number are required to access an account (PIN). Criminals have devised methods to intercept both the data on the magnetic strip of the card and the user's PIN. In turn, the information is utilities to generate phonic cards, which are then used to withdraw monies from the account of an unsuspecting user. For example, the New York Times revealed in 2002 that a single organization engaged in unlawfully stealing ATM information had swiped more than 21,000 American bank accounts. The use of ATMs in shopping malls and convenience stores has been demonstrated to be a particularly effective type of fraud. These machines are self-contained and not physically attached to a bank. Criminals can easily put up a machine that appears to be legal; however, instead of dispensing money, the machine collects information on users and only informs them that the machine is out of commission after they have entered their PINs. ATM fraud has become a global issue because ATMs are the primary means of dispensing currency all around the world.
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| Financial fraud |
4. Fraud involving wire transfers:
The worldwide element of cybercrime is most visible in wire fraud. Vladimir Levin, a Russian programmer at a computer software firm in St. Petersburg, engineered one of the largest and best-organized wire fraud scams. Levin began $10 million of transferring from Citibank, N.A. subsidiaries in Argentina and Indonesia to bank accounts in San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Germany, and Finland in 1994, with the help of dozens of confederates. According to Citibank, all but $400,000 of the monies were finally recovered as Levin's associates attempted to withdraw them. Levin was arrested in 1995 while passing through Heathrow Airport in London (at the time, Russia had no extradition treaty for cybercrime). Levin was eventually extradited to the United States in 1998, where he was sentenced to three years in prison and compelled to repay Citibank $240,015. It has never been revealed how Levin obtained the requisite account names and passwords, but no Citibank employee has ever been charged in connection with the case. Because banking institutions priorities security and privacy, determining the real scope of wire fraud is challenging. Wire fraud remained a global issue in the early twenty-first century.
5. Pornography involving children:
Pornography has been the "killer app" for practically every new media technology, or the application that pushed early deployment of technical advancements in quest of profit. The Internet was no exception, but there was a criminal component to this business boom: child pornography, which was independent to the profitable business of legal adult-oriented pornography. Child pornography, defined here as photos of children under the age of 18 engaging in sexual behavior, is prohibited in the United States, the European Union, and many other nations, but it remains a problem with no obvious solution. The problem is exacerbated by the capacity of "kiddie porn" Web sites to propagate their content from countries such as the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asia that lack cybercrime laws. Some law enforcement agencies claim that child pornography is a $3 billion-a-year industry, with over 10,000 Internet sites providing access to these items.
Through the use of "chat rooms" to find and lure victims, the Internet also offers pedophiles with an unprecedented chance to perpetrate illegal activities. The virtual and physical worlds collide in a particularly perilous way here. In several countries, state officials now pose as children in chat rooms; despite broad awareness of this practice, pedophiles continue to contact these "children" in order to meet them "offline." The fact that such a gathering carries a high danger of imminent arrest does not appear to discourage pedophiles. Surprisingly, authorities are able to apprehend pedophiles since the Internet permits individual privacy to be violated.
6. Spam, steganography, and email hacking are all examples of cybercrime:
Spam, or unsolicited advertisements for products and services, has generated one of the most major kinds of cybercrime, with experts estimating that it accounts for about half of all e-mail circulating on the Internet. Spam is a crime against all Internet users since it wastes ISP storage and network capacity while also being often offensive. Nonetheless, despite repeated attempts to legislate its abolition, it remains unclear how spam may be removed without infringing on free expression in a liberal democratic polity. Unlike junk mail, which has a postal fee, spam is almost free for perpetrators—it usually costs the same to send 10 messages as it does to send 10 million.
One of the most difficult issues in shutting down spammers is their usage of other people's computers. Typically, a virus or Trojan horse infects multiple workstations linked to the Internet, giving the spammer hidden control. Such devices are referred to as zombie computers, and networks of them, frequently including thousands of infected computers, can be activated to flood the Internet with spam or to launch Do attacks. While the former is nearly always benign, such as pleas to buy legitimate goods, Do assaults have been used to blackmail Web sites by threatening to shut them down. According to cyber specialists, the United States accounts for roughly one-fourth of the world's 4-8 million zombie computers and is the source of nearly one-third of all spam.
E-mail is also used as a tool by both traditional criminals and terrorists. While libertarians applaud the use of encryption to preserve communication privacy, criminals and terrorists may use cryptography to disguise their objectives. According to law enforcement experts, some terrorist groups insert instructions and information in photos using steganography, a sophisticated means of hiding information in plain sight. Even recognizing that anything is hidden in this manner often necessitates significant processing power; actually decoding the information is practically difficult if the key to separate the hidden data is not available.
An e-mail sent to a firm pretends to be from an executive at another company with which the business is collaborating in a sort of fraud known as business e-mail compromise (BEC). The "executive" requests that money be transferred into a specific account in the e-mail. According to the FBI, BEC scams have cost American firms over $750 million.
Sometimes e-mail that a company wants to keep private is obtained and released. In 2014, hackers calling themselves "Guardians of Peace" leaked e-mail from Sony Pictures Entertainment executives, as well as other secret company information. The hackers requested that Sony Pictures not release The Interview, a comedy about a CIA plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, and threatened to assault theatres where the film was being shown. Sony released the film online and in limited theatrical release after American movie theatre chains cancelled showing. E-mail hacking has even had an impact on politics. In 2016, hackers suspected to be from Russia obtained e-mail from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Wikileaks leaked the e-mail just before the Democratic National Convention, revealing a clear preference among DNC officials for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign over that of her competitor, Bernie Sanders. DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned, and several American observers concluded that the e-revelation mail's demonstrated the Russian government's backing for Republican nominee Donald Trump.
7. Viruses on Computers:
Another sort of cybercrime is the intentional distribution of harmful computer viruses. In fact, the first individual convicted in the United States under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 committed this offence. On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris, a computer science student at Cornell University, launched a software "worm" from MIT onto the Internet (as a guest on the campus, he hoped to remain anonymous). The worm was a self-propagating and replicating computer program that exploited weaknesses in various e-mail protocols. Because to a programming error, instead of simply transmitting copies of itself to other computers, this software kept duplicating itself on each infected system, filling all available computer memory. The worm had brought 6,000 computers (one-tenth of the Internet) to a stop before a patch was discovered. Morris' worm took months and millions of dollars to repair, but the event had limited commercial ramifications because the Internet had not yet become a fixture of economic affairs. Because Morris' father was the head of computer security for the United States National Security Agency, the press interpreted the incident as a high-tech Oedipal drama rather than a harbinger of things to come. Since then, anarchists and misfits from countries as diverse as the United States, Bulgaria, Pakistan, and the Philippines have created progressively more dangerous viruses.
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