Definition of Cyber Crime

Definition of Cyber Crime

“Any crime that involves a computer and a network is called a "Computer Crime" or “Cyber Crime”.

For this purpose a computer may have been used to commit such crime or simply a computer may be the target.

Another term called “Internet crime” refers to criminal activities for exploiting the internet. These crimes include and is not limited to identity theft, threatening a nation’s security, copyright infringement and child pornography. These crimes have become a threat to individual privacy, where confidential data, individual’s identity or photos and videos etc. is stolen or intercepted by the attacker.

In “Cyber Crime” such as identity theft, financial theft, espionage mostly non-state agents and government organizations are involved.

For example, in the latest turn of events the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States was held responsible for intercepting and spying on millions of online users.

Or in another example, the Chinese hackers were involved in constantly hacking into Big US organizations and agencies like the latest attack on the New York Times in January 2013.

Such criminal activities carried out online involving nations and state missionary is known as “Cyber Warfare”.

What is a Hacker?

After all this discussion it is pertinent to define a hacker.

“A hacker is someone who breaks into computer or a computer network”.

Hackers are motivated to commit such crimes either for financial gains, protesting against any political activity or just to challenge the limits of his skills and expertise in the field. Not all hackers show theirs skills in performing criminal activities. Some hackers look for loophole & backdoors in software and websites, and if any vulnerabilities are found they report back to the owner or the authorities. One such example happened recently when a young Palestinian hacker found a bug in Facebook and he reported that bug to the authorities. But unfortunately he wasn’t given any credit or reward for showing his skills and good intentions.

That’s how experts distinguish hackers from Crackers. A hacker is someone who carries out such activities with good intentions and a cracker do the same but his main objective is to cause harm.

Types of Cyber Crimes

Computer Intrusion

Computer intrusion is any malicious activity that harms a computer, or causes a computer or a computer network to work in an unexpected manner. These attacks involves spreading of virus, denial of services or exploitation of the operating system or a software feature.

Social Engineering

The term “social Engineering” means to fool a user by sending him an email or calling him to provide confidential data like passwords etc.

Masquerading

In this type of attack a system is fooled into giving access by sending a TCP Packet that has a forged source address which makes the packet appears to come from a trusted host.

Denial of Service (DOS Attack)

This type of attack intent is to make resources or service unavailable to its intended users. Such DOS attacks are carried out on websites to stop them from functioning.

Smurf Attack

This attack generates large amount of traffic on a victims network, which causes the network to crash. Smurf Attack is a type of DOS attack.

Fraggle Attach

It is a type of DOS attach where the attacker sends a large amount of UDP echo traffic to IP broadcast addresses.

Email Bombing

Email bombing means sending thousands of email to a victim causing the victim’s mail account or mail server to crash.

Logic Bomb

A logic Bomb is an event driver attack. This type of attack activates only if certain even occurs.

Salami Attack

This type of attack is carried out for financial gains. In Salami Attack, the key is to make changes so small that in a single case it can go unnoticed. For instance, a bank employee deducts 2 Dollars from every single customer or transaction. The customer is unlikely to notice the change but the employee gets a fortune.