Nurhanisah

What is cybercrimes? According to the dictionary definition of cybercrime “ it is a criminal activity committed on the internet. It may refers to everything from electronic cracking to denial of service attacks that can cause electronic commerce sites to lose money”. Mr Pavan, the President of www.cyberlaws.net has categorized cybercrimes  into 3 types :

1.    Cybercrimes against persons.

2.    Cybercrimes against property.

3.    Cybercrimes against government.

Cybercrimes against persons : Cybercrimes committed against persons include various crimes for an example transmission of child pornography. The trafficking, distribution and posting of obscene materials like pornography and indecent exposure, somehow constitutes one of the most important cyber crimes known today. This is one Cybercrime which threatens to undermine the growth of the younger generation and may give phychological effects if it is not being control. Melissa virus is a virus that appeared on the internet on March 1999. It spread rapidly throughout computer systems in the United States and Europe and this damage was not done to a person but to the masses. It was estimated that the virus caused 80 million dollars in damages to computer worldwide.

Cybercrimes against property: The second category of Cyber crimes is that of cybercrimes against all forms of property. Thse crimes include computer vandalism, tansmission of harmful programmes.

Cybercrimes against government: The third one relate to cybercrimes against Government. Cyber terrorist is under cybercrime. The growth of internet has shown that the medium of cyberspace is being used by individuals and groups to threaten the international governments as also to terrorise the citizens of a country. This crime manifests itself into terrorism when an individual “cracks’ into a government of military maintained website.

    Cyber-terrorists often commit acts of terrorism simply for personal gain. Such a group, known as the Chaos Computer Club, was discovered in 1997. They had created an Active X Control for the Internet that can trick the Quicken accounting program into removing money from a user's bank account. This could easily be used to steal money from users all over the world that have the Quicken software installed on their computer. This type of file is only one of thousands of types of viruses that can do everything from simply annoy users, to disable large networks, which can have disastrous, even life and death, results.

Cyber terrorism in general, can be defined as an act of terrorism committed through the use of cyberspace or computer resources (Parker 1983). As such, a simple propaganda in the Internet, that there will be bomb attacks during the holidays can be considered cyber terrorism. In addition there are also hacking activities directed towards individuals, families, organized by groups within networks, tending to cause fear among people, demonstrate power, collecting information relevant for ruining peoples' lives, robberies, blackmailing etc.

Cyber extortion is a form of cyber terrorism in which a website, e-mail server, or computer system is subjected to repeated denial of service or other attacks by malicious hackers, who demand money in return for promising to stop the attacks. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cyber extortionists are increasingly attacking corporate websites and networks, crippling their ability to operate and demanding payments to restore their service. More than 20 cases are reported each month to the FBI and many go unreported in order to keep the victim's name out of the public domain.

An article titled as ‘many UK businesses prey to cybercrime’ on the August 30 has been published, it stated that cybercrime is on the rise in the UK and for the first time, those businesses that are hit by hacks are more likely to be attacked by hackers from outside of the company instead of inside, according to a study published Wednesday by the Confederation. of the British Industry (CBI). Of the 148 companies surveyed for the study "Cybercrime Survey 2001", two birds have been the victim of a "serious" cybercrime in the past year, said CBI spokesman Roger Davidson. The CBI defined a serious cybercrime as a case of hacking of a company's computer system, a virus attack or credit card fraud.