Definition
Cybercrimes are defined as “Offences that are committed against individuals or groups of individuals with a criminal motive to intentionally harm the reputation of the victim or cause physical or mental harm to the victim directly or indirectly, using modern
telecommunication networks such as the Internet through chat rooms, emails, notice boards, groups, and mobile phones through SMS or MMS.”
Introduction to Computer Crimes
Computer crimes refer to any crime that involves a computer and a network.
Computer related crimes have increased due to the:
- Connectivity of the Internet
- Low costs of computational resources
Examples: cracking, copyright infringement, child pornography, child grooming, etc.
Categories of Computer Crimes
The major categories of computer crime are as follows:
- Computer assisted crimes
Computer assisted crimes are criminal activities carried out using computers as mere tools and are not specific to computers.
Examples: fraud, distributed denial of service attacks, counterfeit, theft, child pornography, etc. 80% of all criminal investigations include evidence that is digital in nature.
- Computers as the target of crimes
Computers as the target of crimes are criminal activities focused on systems, servers, networks, and the data stored on these systems.
Examples: sniffing, denial of service, password attacks, viruses, digital identity theft, computer hacking, etc.
These crimes target information systems and the underlying architecture.
- Computers incidental to the crimes
Computers incidental to the crimes are those crimes where the computer is related or incidental to the crime.
Crime occurs without the use of computers.
Example: list of customers for traffickers
Online activities, whether based on the Internet or cell phones are logged and recorded.
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