Brief History of Cyber Crime

Brief History of Cyber Crime

The first recorded cyber crime took place in the year 1820 although it is the fact that the abacus, which is thought to be the earliest form of a computer, has been around since 3500 B.C. in India, Japan and China. The era of modern computers, however, began with the analytical engine of Charles Babbage .

The first spam email took place in 1978 when it was sent out over the Arpanet .The first virus was installed on an Apple computer in 1982 when a high school student, Rich Skrenta, developed the Elk cloner.

Categorizing Cyber Crime

We can categorize Cyber crimes in two ways

The Computer as a Target:using a computer to attack other computers.

E.g. Hacking, Virus/Worm attacks, DOS attack etc.

E.g. Cyber Terrorism, IPR violations, Credit card frauds, EFT frauds, Pornography etc.

Various Cyber Crimes:

HACKING

Hacking in simple terms means an illegal intrusion into a computer system and or network. Government websites are the hot targets of the hackers due to the press coverage, it receives. Hackers enjoy the media coverage.

Motives Behind hacking: Greed, Power, Publicity, Revenge, Adventure, Desire to access forbidden information, Destructive mindset, wants to sell n/w security services.

CYBER STALKING

Cyber stalking is the use of the Internet or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual, a group of individuals, or an organization. Moreover, cyber-stalking refers to the use of the Internet, e-mail, or other electronic communications device to stalk another person. It is a relatively new form of harassment, unfortunately, rising to alarming levels especially in big cities. It may include false accusations, monitoring, making threats, identity theft, and damage to data or equipment, the solicitation of minors for sex, or gathering information in order to harass.

CYBER TERRORISM

Terrorist attacks on the Internet is by distributed denial of service attacks, hate websites and hate emails, attacks on sensitive computer networks, etc. Technology savvy terrorists are using 512-bit encryption, which is impossible to decrypt.

The recent example may be given of – Osama Bin Laden, the LTTE, and attack on America’s army deployment system during Iraq war.

CHILD PORNOGRAPHY

The Internet is being highly used by its abusers to reach and abuse children sexually, worldwide. As more homes have access to internet, more children would be using the internet and more are the chances of falling victim to the aggression of pedophiles.

Pedophiles use false identity to trap the teenagers Pedophiles contact teens in various chat rooms which are used by teen to interact with other teen befriend the teen. Extract personal information from the child/teen by winning his confidence.

COMPUTER VANDALISM

Damaging or destroying data rather than stealing or misusing them is called cyber vandalism. Transmitting virus: These are programs that attach themselves to a file and then circulate. They usually affect the data on a computer, either by altering or deleting it against properties.

VIRUS DISSEMINATION

Malicious software that attaches itself to other software  (Virus, worms, Trojan horse, web jacking, e-mail bombing etc).

VIRUS

A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term “virus” is also commonly, but erroneously, used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have a reproductive ability.

WORMS

Worms are parasitic computer programs or constellation of programs that replicate itself through the network. Worms can create copies of itself on the same computer, or send the copies to other computers via e-mail or the network. Worms often spread via IRC/Internet and e-mail.

TROJAN HORSE

A Trojan horse is a malicious program that pretends to be a benign application. A Trojan horse is purposefully developed to get access to a computer or otherwise to get information residing on the computer. A Trojan horse program can be just as destructive.

SPOOFING:

A spoofed email is one that appears to originate from one source but actually has been sent from another source (Illegal intrusion, posing as a genuine user).Spoofing means a hacker logs-in to a computer illegally using a different identity than his own. He is able to do this by having previously obtained actual password. He creates a new identity by fooling the computer into thinking he is the genuine system operator. Hacker then takes control of the system.

DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACK

(DoS Attack) This is an act by the criminal, who floods the bandwidth of the victims network or fills his e-mail box with spam mail depriving him of the services he is entitled to access or provide. Many DoS attacks, such as the Ping of Death and Teardrop attacks, exploit limitations in the TCP/IP protocols. This act is committed by a technique called spoofing and buffer overflow.  The criminal spoofs the IP address and flood the network of the victim with repeated requests.  Since the IP address is fake, the victim machine keeps waiting for response from the criminal’s machine for each request. This consumes the bandwidth of the network which then fails to serve the legitimate requests and ultimately breaks down.

SOFTWARE PIRACY

Theft of software through the illegal copying of genuine programs or the counterfeiting and distribution of products intended to pass for the original is termed as termed as software piracy. Examples of software piracy. End user copies Friends loaning disks to each other, or organizations underreporting the number of software installations they have made. Hard disk loading – Hard disk vendor’s loads pirated software. Counterfeiting – large-scale duplication and distribution of illegally copied software. Illegal downloads from the Internet by intrusion, cracking serial numbers etc.

CYBER DEFAMATION

This occurs when defamation takes place with the help of computers and / or the Internet. Cyber Defamation is a crime conducted in cyberspace, usually through the Internet, with the intention of defaming others.