Part II. Computer crime

Warm-up activities

1. What do you understand by the term “computer crime”?

2. What examples of computer abuse do you know?

3. Are computer crimes merely improved patterns of traditional crimes?

4. What are the reasons of computer crime?

5. What is your attitude to computer criminals?

Computer Crimes: What do we know about them?

Any crime is a socially harmful and dangerous act that is prohibited by public law and that carries a specific punishment. The first crime in the history of mankind was committed by Cain, who murdered his brother Abel. God punished Cain sending him into exile. Perhaps the atheists and Darwinism followers wouldn’t agree with the fact but the truth is that that crimes emerged at the earliest stage of human existence and have followed the man since. Murder and assassination, battery, theft, fraud, counterfeiting, bribery, embezzlement, hijacking and kidnapping is a far from being complete list of criminal acts. Since the beginning of the Hi Tech Age traditional crimes have evolved into new more sophisticated forms. Nowadays the matter concerns computer crimes.

In general computer crime is an illegal act involving using a computer and information technology infrastructure, appropriate technical skills and knowledge. Sometimes criminals simply devise various ways to undertake well-known crimes such as fraud, theft, forgery, blackmail and embezzlement using computers and networks (in particular the Internet) to facilitate the illicit activity. But the sphere of computer and information technologies is a fertile field for fresh criminal actions. Such misdeeds as denial-of service(DoS) attacks, altering websites, phishing, pharming, ID theft, copyright infringement, releasing malicious programs, harassment and stalking in cyberspace enlarged and enriched the list of already existing traditional crimes.

It is rather difficult to give a classification of computer crimes, because in this case a computer (or network) can be the tool, the target and/or place of the crime. Mostly the basis of any computer crime is gaining of unauthorized access. I will try to present here my classification, based on two kinds of criminal intent – to obtain necessary information for criminal purposes and to cause damage (financial, psychological), where a computer can be the target itself or just the medium of communication with people. Of course, all this systematization is rather relative.

		COMPUTER
		Medium of communication and influence on people	Target
MOTIVATION	to obtain necessary information	Internet fraud e-mail fraud ID theft phishing	spyware copyright infringement
	to cause damage	cyberterrorism drug trafficking extortion harassment cyberstalking pornography	malware viruses cyberhooliganism obscene graffiti altering websites computer voyeur changing data deleting data denying service to authorized users denial-of-service attacks

The most astounding thing about hi-tech crime is that there are no any precise statistics, based on all the facts of illegal actions. Many of these crimes are never reported to the authorities. Partly because people realize that it is rather difficult to catch and accuse the criminal. Partly because people mainly officials, company executives are afraid of bad publicity as it was in the case with City Bank, which was targeted by the Russian hacker Vladimir Levin. Sometimes people don’t even suspect that they are attacked by cyber criminals. We only know about the unsuccessful crimes, how many successful ones have remained undetected we may only guess. It is obvious that computer criminals don’t show any respect for privacy of other people and the punishment for them should me more severe.