Cyber Crime is termed as any unlawful activity, which involves exploiting the computer as well as a network as key sources to carry out illegalities that are unfavourable and not considered right in the eye of cyber law. Cyber crime has been vastly prevalent over the last few years, especially due to the technology that has been on the scale of constant up gradation Some of the most common cyber crimes include network intrusions, identity theft, terrorism, tracing the computer activity, stalking, online hacking, or purposely propagating computer viruses and so on. The computer can be used in the form of a target – attacking others’ computers, a weapon – exploiting the facilitated computer to commit crime, and as an accessory – to store illegal, secretive or stolen data.
Frequently committed cyber crimes include:
- Illicit Access – meddling and accessing the computers or networks of other users to which the criminal lacks the right and license is a very common crime and is referred to as hacking
- Email Bombing – sending across a number of emails to the targeted victim, which results in the email account or mail server crashing suddenly
- Salami Attacks – used for financial crimes. The criminal intelligently makes insignificant and unnoticeable alterations to seize the account of bank customers to withdraw money. Even Logic Bombs can be used in financial crimes. Logic bombs are nothing but programs that are activated when a predefined event occurs. Well planned crimes are perfectly complemented by logic bombs
- Theft of Electronic Data – stealing electronic data from the computer system from a storage device like hard disks or other external/removable storage devices. This is theft of confidential electronic information
- Virus Attack – viruses or computer files/programs that attach to the files on the user’s system and circulate to other files and computer in a network can potentially damage the computer and affect the stored or installed data. It could result in file corruption or loss of data
- Worm Attack - there are computer Worms, which, unlike viruses, make a number of functional copies of the same kind repeatedly and consume all the available memory in the system. In this case, it is difficult to identify the original, relevant and essential files and programs that are important for the operation of the system
- Service Attack – overloading a computer resource like the hub or the web server with several requests causes the resource to crash due to flooding. This results in the system barring the authentic users access the system. DDoS – Distributed Denial of Service is an attack where many culprits are involved, spread across a large geographical area. Here, excessive demands are sent over to the victim’s computer system. When the limit exceeds, the servers crash, thereby denying access even to real users!
Illegal online behavior is increasing in the present times with more and more technological inventions. It is quite distressing to combat the fact that unknown faces or even known people can be computer criminals who can pose great danger when it comes to unauthorized seizure of important and confidential information. The law enforcement's should be more stringent and the technology should grow further to be able to find the criminals online at once. It is important that each one of us should familiarize ourselves with all types of unethical online crimes and conduct.