1.0
CONTENT
1.1
CLASSIFICATION OF CYBER CRIME
Cyber
crime may be classified into four (4) major categories as can be seen in reportcybercrime.com, and they are as
listed below.
i)
Cyber crime against individual,
ii)
Cyber crime against property,
iii)
Cyber crime against organization, and
iv)
Cyber crime against society.
2.1.1 Cyber Crime against Individuals
It
is an illegal act which includes various crimes like transmission of
child-pornography, harassment of any one with or without the use of computer
but still with a use of the network. These include the usage of smart phone or iPad via short text messaging (SMS) and pictures messaging (MMS) as
in Ryan Patrick Halligan (Vermont).
Harassment may vary from sending hate mails as in Megan Taylor Meier (USA) to defamatory statements, it is also known
as cyber bullying in other countries. There are various kinds of harassments; it can
be sexual, racial, religious and others. The aftermath of the crimes may leads
to suicide (victim) as in the cases mentioned and in Ryan Patrick Halligan, a
13 years boy in Vermont, he became bullies’ victim in real and virtual world and
later found dead in his bathroom.
Other
than that, spamming is also considered as cyber crime; however it depends on
the numbers of mail sent to a person in one day, therefore spamming means
sending multiple copies of unsolicited mails or mass e-mails (Prashant Mali).
Example of spamming is chain letters and advertising brochure through e-mails. Cyberstalking
is also one of the cyber crimes against individuals and it sometimes has some
link to ‘sextortion’. Offender usually targeted teenagers, children and women
as his prey. Dissemination of obscene material is also considered as cyber
crime against individuals especially if such immoral materials sent to or
viewed by minors.
2.1.2 Cyber Crimes against Property
The
common cyber crime under this category is credit card fraud. Tommy Seah in an
article published in thenewnewinternet.com
mentioned that “the most widespread of financial crimes in Malaysia were
financial statement frauds, procurement frauds and misappropriation of assets”.
According to Malaysian national news outlet Bernama, financial and cyber crimes
are the most common crimes commited in Malaysia.
Credit
cards are meant to make life easier, it is a substitution to real cash,
therefore some people refer it as the ‘plastic’ money for we need not to worry
of losing our money or misplaced our full of cash wallet anywhere. Even though
if we ever lost our credit card in the street, our money will still be safe
because it is protected by our signature and PIN numbers and password. However
when credit cards are being used widely on the Internet for online shopping or online banking, it become dangerous.
Just at the click of the mouse; our saving could be wiped out in a split of
seconds due to our own negligence.
According
to Choong Wai Hong (the chief of Maybank Virtual Banking), there were 1,200
online banking fraud traced between January and June in 2008 alone which
involved RM348.5 billion transaction and RM 1 million lost.
Other
than fraud, there is another method of crime against property in the Internet which is known as Salami
Attack. It is a series of minor attack onto unsuspecting victims that
together will results in a larger attack. For example, an offender steals 10
cent from everyone’s account around the world through online banking. Just
imagine the sum of money he will able to acquire if he succeeded.
Another
type of cyber crime against property is intellectual property crimes which
includes software piracy, illegal copying of programs, distribution of copies
of software, songs, movies, and so on. It involves copyright infringement,
registered trademarks violations and theft of computer source code. In other
word, it is known as piracy which involve illegal reproduction and distribution
which causing monetary loss to the original owner. Example of web site that had
been closed down due to copyright issue was napster.com.
Other
than that, computer vandalism is a cyber crime and it may happen when the
offender transmit computer virus or worms directly or through the Internet with
an intention to do harm and damages onto the victim’s computer or any other
electronic devices. Example of computer viruses and worms are; Trojan, I Love
You, Chernobyl virus and others.
These
viruses are capable of gaining control over another’s system and designed to
either cause damages to affected computers or to obtain or alter the data in a
computer. For example; Trojan was installed in the computer of a lady film
director in the USA and use this virus to obtained her nude pictures and later
use them to harassed her.
Another
cyber crime under this category will be the ‘Internet Time Theft’. It is a
situation where the usage of the Internet hours were used by an unauthorized
person but actually paid by another person. This is done by gaining access to
the login ID and password of the unsuspecting payer as in Colonel Bajwa’s case in
India.
2.1.3 Cyber Crime against Organization
This
include unauthorized control or access over the computer system, possession of
unauthorized information, cyber terrorism against the government, and other
illegal act which may overlapped with cyber crimes as stated earlier.
Accessing
the computer or the network without permission from the owner may be divided
into two forms as mentioned in an article in lawyersclubindis.com written by Prashant Mali (2009). The first one
is, changing or deleting data which consist of unauthorized changing of data
and the second form is computer voyeur where the offender reads or copies
confidential or any proprietary information for keeping. This type of cyber
crime usually committed by professional hackers with the intention to gain
profitable information for business purposes or such information kept to be use
against their business rival later.
Denial
of service is when the Internet server is flooded with continuous bogus
requests such as the ‘pop up’ messages or web which resulted denying or caused
the computer ‘hang’ or the server ‘crashed’. Other than that denial of services
happens when the access routers is flooded with bogus traffic. To some extent,
the Internet access is interrupted or blocked so as to deny a person from going
online or browsing through the Internet or
certain web pages.
Turkish
authorities had detained 32 suspected members of the same group whom believed
to be involved in several attacks on Turkish state agencies. They (Anonymous)
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Turkish Telecoms regulator’s
website.
Another
cyber crime that had been raising concern is cyber terrorism. Wikipedia.com quoting Technolytics
Institute defined it as "The premeditated use of disruptive activities, or
the threat thereof, against computers and/or networks, with the intention to
cause harm or further social, ideological, religious, political or similar
objectives. Or to intimidate any person in furtherance of such
objectives."
In
mid June 2011, a group of cyber activist named themselves as Anonymous
threatened (and executed) an attack on the Malaysia government’s official
website based on their belief that the government of Malaysia of stifling
freedom of expression on the Internet
when the Malaysian government had decided to block access to popular
file-sharing website used to illegally download movies, TV show and music.
2.1.4 Cyber Crime against Society
Cyber
terrorism may also be categorized as a crime against society where it main
target may be against women, children, race or even a group of people. As
mentioned earlier the cyber crime may be over lapped under each classification
but against the different group target as a victim. Modus operandi or the criminal act will be still the same. The main
purpose is to intimidate or to coerce others so as to follow and fulfil their
objectives.
Usually
offender will hacks into the website of another and gain access and control
over, the offender then further change the content of the website based on
their either political objective or for money. Some even go beyond with the
intention to sabotage the website.
1.2
COMPARISON OF CYBER CRIMES IN MALAYSIA
AND USA
In
1984, United State of America started to take actions against cybercrime and a
law regarding it had been enacted. The new law was named as Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C.
1030). As time goes by, USA had strengthened their weapons to fight and
address cyber crimes and at the same time to prosecutes cyberspace offenders as
accordance to the law. In 2001, there were nine specialized prosecutorial units
that had been proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice for this purpose alone.
The team set up then known as Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property Units
and will be responsible to address any complaints which may consist of computer
intrusions and hacking, fraud, copyright and trademark violations; and theft of
trade secrets and economic espionage.
Other
than the set up units, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) too plays its
roles in combating and addressing the cyber crimes. The National Infrastructure
Protection Center was created in February 1998 to detect, assess and
investigate significant threats and incidents concerning intrusion of critical
infrastructures.
In
Malaysia, there is a computer CSI which had been set up to monitor such
activities known as CyberSecurity Malaysia, it is an agency under the Ministry
of Science Technology and Innovation (MOSTI). It consist of a team which known
as MyCERT or the Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team consist of a group
of specialists such as Intrusion Analysts, Malware Analysts, Application
Security Analysts, and Emergency Response Professionals.
After
surfing through the Internet in finding the most reliable statistic on the
amount of cyber crimes, it comes to a decision that there are no precise answer
because many of these crimes are apparently not detected by the victims for
they are never reported to the responsible authorities as stated by Standler
(1999) whether in USA or in Malaysia.
Basically,
most cyber crimes committed in USA and Malaysia are the same whether it is
cyber crimes against individuals, property, organization or the society. Over
4,000 complaints lodged and filed with CyberSecurity Malaysia between 2007 and
2008 which are comprised fraud, hack threats, Denial-of-Services conditions,
viruses attack as reported.
Computer Forensics recruiter.com gave
an overall cyber crime statistics from 2006
which shown as below;
- In 2006, the Internet Crime Complaint Center received and processed over 200,000 complaints.
- More than 86,000 of these complaints were processed and referred to various local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.
- Most of these were consumers and persons filing as private persons.
- Total alleged dollar losses were more than $194 million.
- Email and websites were the two primary mechanisms for fraud.
- Although the total number of complaints decreased by approximately 7,000 complaints from 2005, the total dollar losses increased by $15 million.
- The top frauds reported were auction fraud, non-delivery of items, check fraud, and credit card fraud.
- Top contact mechanisms for perpetrators to victims were email (74%), web page (36%), and phone (18%) (there was some overlap).[1]
Whether
this statistics were based on complaints lodged within USA alone or not is not
stated.
In
a 2003 survey conducted by the CSI with the participation of the San Francisco
Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Computer Intrusion Squad, of the 530
respondents made up of U.S. corporations, government agencies, financial
institutions, medical institutions and universities, 56% reported unauthorized
use of their computer systems. [2]
In
August 1983, a group of young hackers in Milwaukee hacked into a computer at
the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York City. Any alteration to the
computer which was storing cancer patients’ radiation treatment would result
fatal and severe outcome. The incident later cited by the U.S. Congress in the
legislative history of a federal computer crime statute.
Denial
of Service (Dos) attacks is also known as denial of services, in mid June 2011
the Malaysian government’s official websites were attacked by a group named
Anonymous. Due to the irresponsible act, 51 official websites belong to the
Malaysian government was inaccessible. Malaysia’s Communication and Multimedia
Commission reported that 51 websites in the gov.my
domain were attacked beginning late Wednesday(15 June,2011), and 41 of the
sites suffered various levels of disruption.
Fraud
was the most reported cyber crime in Malaysia. CyberSecurity had dealt 2, 123 incidents
of cyber crime and nearly 50% of the incidents reported were related to fraud
while the rest were malware infections, spam, online harassment, malicious
websites, intrusions and et cetera.
[1]
The
Internet Crime Complaint Center is a clearinghouse for online economic crime
complaints. It is maintained by the National White Collar Crime Center and the
Federal Bureau of Investigations. To review the results of the study, visit the
National White Collar Crime Center's site.
[2] “2003
CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey”, internet,
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/CSI_FBI.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment