THE DEFINITION OF CYBER CRIME

Cyber crime, in general, is a broad term that is defined as the unlawful acts in which a computer or other allied computing device (such as mobile) is used as a target or a tool or both or a place to conduct any criminal activity and every unlawful electronic method from denial of service attacks to electronic cracking. Cyber Crimes are generally related to the internet and system based crimes such as debit/credit card frauds, phishing, industrial espionage, child pornography, illegal downloading, online scams, Cyber terrorism, virus viruses, online exploitation, online frauds and so on. Cyber crimes also cover the traditional methods in which computer or system networks are used as tool to perform the illicit activity.

TYPES OF CYBER CRIMES

Cyber Crimes are broadly categorized in two forms:

1. The crimes in which a computer/computing devices/mobile phone/system network is the target. For example: Virus attacks, Hacking, and DOS attack etc.

2. The crimes in which a computer/computing devices/mobile phone/system network is used as a weapon. For example: IPR violations, Cyber terrorism, pornography, EFT frauds, and credit card frauds etc.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF CYBER CRIMES

Following are the different forms of Cyber crimes:

1. Website Hacking:

Website hacking refers to the act of unauthorized access into a computer, computer system, computing devices or computer network without the permission of the rightful persons. Every possible act committed to breaking into a computer, computing device and/or network refer to hacking. In general, hackers use ready-made or custom-written computer programs to intrude into the target computer, network or other computing devices with a motto of destruction, stealing or gaining access to confidential information. While some hackers intrude the computers for personal monetary gains whereas some hackers do it for stealing confidential data. Some of the main mottos of website hacking are stealing information related to bank accounts and cards, stealing of personal data, and gaining access to confidential information. The Government, ecommerce and other popular websites are general more vulnerable to the hackers.

2. Pornography:

Pornography refers to the online represented acts which are considered sexual in order to perform sexual excitement. The definition of pornography also includes the production of pornographic websites, pornographic magazines and distribution of pornography over the mobile phones or computer networks.

3. Child Pornography:

Child pornography is defined as the visual depictions of sexually explicit materials involving a minor (under 18 years of age). Visual depictions include videos, photographs, digital or computer generated images. The storage of electronic data that can be converted into any form of child pornography is also deemed illegal. Besides, Cyber crimes also include the possession, production, reception, and distribution of image/video related to child pornography.

4. Cyber Stalking:

Cyberstalking refers to the act of harassing a victim by a stalker through the means of e-mail, instant messaging (IM), or messages posted on a discussion group or website. The stalker reckons upon the anonymity offered by the Internet in order stalk their victims in a confidential manner. Cyber Stalking is something different from ordinary spamming because a Cyberstalker targets a specific victim with mostly threatening messages whereas the spammer targets a large group of individuals with annoying messages.

5. Cyber Terrorism:

Cyber terrorism is known as the act of premeditated use of computer network for disruptive or terrorist activities including the acts of large-scale disturbance of computer networks (personal, commercial or government systems) with an intention to cause political, social, ideological, religious, or similar damages.

6. Denial of Service Attack:

DoS or denial-of-service attack is a method used by attackers to restrict lawful users from accessing the service. This particular type of crime is done by sending multiple request commands to the server or network to authenticate requests to invalid return addresses. Since the server will be unable to find the return address of the hacker while sending the authentication approval, it will come to halt before terminating the connection. As soon as the server terminates the connection, the hacker immediately sends similar types of request commands causing the server to wait again and again for keeping the server busy.

7. Distributed Denial of Service Attack

DdoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack is an act of making an online service inaccessible by engaging it with the enormous amount of traffic from multiple distinguished sources. The common target of these attackers are the websites with important resources such as banks, news, social networking websites and government websites to create a challenge for legitimate users as well as publishers to use the website in order to access important information.

8. Virus or Trojan Attacks:

A Virus or Trojan attack is generally a kind of malware that can be employed by cyber criminals into the systems or networks through direct or indirect means. Once activated, these Virus or Trojan attacks allows hackers to gain the access of targeted systems or networks to spy, steal sensitive data and gain backdoor access to the confidential system which may result in deletion, blockage, modification, copying or disruption.

9. Software Piracy:

Software piracy is defined as the unlawful use, copying or distribution of the original programs with an intention of personal or commercial use. This type of Cyber crime is often related to trademark violations, patent violations and copyright infringements.

10. Phishing:

It is defined as the act of falsely claiming an email or website to be of the established legitimate enterprise with an aim to gain private and confidential details of the user for identity theft or monetary benefits. Counterfeiting the original look and functionality, phishing emails or websites often ask for updating personal information, passwords, credit card details or other things which are already presented at the legitimate organization with a sole intention of stealing.

11. Copyright Infringement:

Copyright infringement over the internet describes the act of downloading, hosting or distributing any copyrighted work (such as content, image, design, photo, video or other elements) without the consent or acknowledgment of the lawful copyright owner.

12. Trademark Infringement:

Trademark infringement is the breach of exclusive rights secured by trademark without the consent of the trademark owner. This condition usually occurs when a website's trademark infringe somewhat similar or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another website in addition to the identical products or services covered under the registration.

13. Credit/Debit Card Fraud:

Credit/Debit Card Fraud is somewhat similar to identity theft in which the secured information of Credit/Debit Card is stolen and exploited to gain funds from an account without the authorization or consent of the lawful owner. Possible exploitation sources may include card reading devices, hidden cameras, false Personal Identification Number (PIN) pads or access of saved credit/debit card details from personal resources.

14. Cyber Extortion:

It is defined as a criminal act that involves threatening users to reveal personal life of victims with a motto of demanding money or other benefits to avert or stop the acts.

15. Banking Fraud:

It is an act where Cyber criminals use potentially illegal methods to gain the access to victim's money, accounts, property or other monetary sources by fraudulently posing as a bank. Common methods used are phishing and malware attacks.

16. BOTNET Attack:

A BOTNET attack is referred as the localized attack of a group of interconnected compromised computers or networks over a network to perform malicious activities. Often BOTNET attacks are used for email spamming, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and other information theft ways.

17. Steganography:

Over the Internet, steganography represents the act of hiding message, command or file inside another command, message or file. In this kind of Cyber crime, the attacker takes the consent of victim by manipulating the data in another form for information accessing or other purposes.

18. Squatting Attack:

This is a specific kind of Denial of Service attack in which a program hinders with another program using the mode of shared synchronization objects in an unwanted or unexpected way to interrupt or suspend online services temporarily or indefinitely.

19. Job/Lottery Fraud:

Cyber criminals know how hard  it to mint money is. Keeping this factor in mind, Cyber criminals lure individuals through emails, phones or online advertisements for a promise of job or lottery winning. This always ends up in asking an advance commission, details of accounts or another demands for an assurance of security. But the promise of a job/Lottery is just in real as no one demands a collateral for the promise, it always ends up as a scam.

20. SQL injection Attacks:

SQL injection attacks are used to steal sensitive information such as username or password from data-driven applications through the insertion of malicious SQL statements into the data field for execution. It is the responsibility of website owners to set up parameters to warm system administrators for any sort of SQL injection vulnerability.