Cyber Crime: Definition, Classification, Statistics

In the current era of digitization and with the rapid advancements in technologies our life is becoming more and more dependent on the internet. Be it business, education, shopping, or banking transactions everything is on the internet. There are some threats posed by this enormous rise in digitization which is creating a new set of global concern called as cyber-crime. These crimes can take place in many forms like phishing, identity theft, social engineering and online scams which are a big concern for all the users. This paper recognizes the importance of being familiar with the effects of cyber crime keeping in mind the recent advancements that have taken place and offering solutions to protect oneself from it. Moreover, describing the need of being cyber safe and how such unethical activities can be a problem for us. This paper also reviews the currents technologies to deal with cyber criminal activities, hi-tech technol- ogies that need to be adopted to prevent people from getting webbed.

Keywords: Cyber Crime, Internet, Information Security.

1. Introduction

The term internet can be defined as the collection of many computers that provide a network of electronic connections between the computers. Although internet has its huge set of advantages in every field but there is one major disadvantage that is cybercrime. Cyber Crime is defined as the crime which involves a computer and a network. The computer can be used for carrying out the crime or it can be target also.

The hacker or cybercriminal may use a device to access user’s personal data, business information, identities etc. Every year cybercrimes are affecting several businesses, losing millions of money and harming company’s reputations leading to loss of future business as well. In today’s world, cyber systems provide flexibility leading to its illicit use. With the Government framed Internet policy, Internet along with making the life easy with economic activities like buying, selling, online transactions and social networking brings along many threats. Hacking tools are available on the internet which does not require people to be highly skilled and also encourage them to do inappropriate acts online. Thus, cyber space has made users vulnerable making it important to take necessary steps and avoid exposure from these acts. Highly populated countries like Asia, China are dependent on web resources which creates opportunity to commit such crimes and also makes it difficult to detect and prevent Internet Crimes in the wide networking environment.

2. Cyber Crime

Sussman and Heuston first proposed the term “Cyber Crime” in the year 1995. Cybercrime cannot be described as a single definition, it is best considered as a collection of acts or conducts. These acts are based on the material offence object that affects the computer data or systems. These are the illegal acts where a digital device or information system is a tool or a target or it can be the combination of both. The cybercrime is also known as electronic crimes, computer-related crimes, e-crime, high-technology crime, information age crime etc.

In simple term we can describe “Cyber Crime” are the offences or crimes that takes place over electronic communications or information systems. These types of crimes are basically the illegal activities in which a computer and a network are involved. Due of the development of the internet, the volumes of the cybercrime activities are also increasing because when committing a crime there is no longer a need for the physical present of the criminal. The unusual characteristic of cybercrime is that the victim and the offender may never come into direct contact. Cybercriminals often opt to operate from countries with non-existent or weak cybercrime laws in order to reduce the chances of detection and prosecution. There is a myth among the people that cyber crimes can only be committed over the cyberspace or the internet. In fact cyber crimes can also be committed without ones involvement in the cyber space, it is not necessary that the cyber criminal should remain present online. Software privacy can be taken as an example.

2.1. Evolution of Cyber Crime

The cyber crime is evolved from Morris Worm to the ransomware. Many countries including India are working to stop such crimes or attacks, but these attacks are continuously changing and affecting our nation.

• 1997 – Cyber crimes and viruses initiated, that includes Morris Code worm and other.
• 2004 – Malicious code, Torjan, Advanced worm etc.
• 2007 – Identifying thief, Phishing etc.
• 2010 – DNS Attack, Rise of Botnets, SQL attacks etc.
• 2013 – Social Engineering, DOS Attack, BotNets, Malicious Emails, Ransomware attack etc.
• 2015 – Present Banking Malware, Keylogger, Bitcoin wallet, Phone hijacking, Anroid hack, Cyber warfare etc.

2.2. Classification of Cyber Crime

Cyber Crime can be classified into four major categories. They are as follows:

a) Cyber Crime against individuals: Crimes that are committed by the cyber criminals against an individual or a person. A few cyber crime against individuals are:

• Email spoofing: This technique is a forgery of an email header. This means that the message appears to have received from someone or somewhere other than the genuine or actual source. These tactics are usually used in spam campaigns or in phishing, because people are probably going to open an electronic mail or an email when they think that the email has been sent by a legitimate source.
• Spamming: Email spam which is otherwise called as junk email. It is unsought mass message sent through email. The uses of spam have become popular in the mid-1990s and it is a problem faced by most email users nowadays. Recipient’s email addresses are obtained by spam bots, which are automated programs that crawls the internet in search of email addresses. The spammers use spam bots to create email distribution lists. With the expectation of receiving a few number of respond a spammer typically sends an email to millions of email addresses.
• Cyber defamation: Cyber defamation means the harm that is brought on the reputation of an individual in the eyes of other individual through the cyber space. The purpose of making defamatory statement is to bring down the reputation of the individual.

b) Cyber Crime against property: These types of crimes includes vandalism of computers, Intellectual (Copyright, patented, trademark etc) Property Crimes, Online threatening etc. Intellectual property crime includes:

• Software piracy: It can be describes as the copying of software unauthorizedly.
• Copyright infringement: It can be described as the infringements of an individual or organization’s copyright. In simple term it can also be describes as the using of copyright materials unauthorizedly such as music, software, text etc.
• Trademark infringement: It can be described as the using of a service mark or trademark unauthorizedly.

c) Cyber Crime against organisation: Cyber crime against organisation are as follows:

• Unauthorized changing or deleting of data.
• Reading or copying of confidential information unauthorizedly.
• DOS Attack: In this attack, the attacker floods the servers, systems or networks with traffic in order to overwhelm the victim resources and make it infeasible or difficult for the users to use them.

3. Causes of Cyber Crime

• Ease of access: The problem encountered in guarding a computer system from unauthorised access is that there is every possibility of violating the technology by stealing access codes, recorders, pins, retina imagers etc. that can be used to fool biometric systems and bypass firewalls to get past many a security system.
• Cyber Hoaxes: Cyber Crimes can be committed just to cause threats or damage one’s reputation. This is the most dangerous of all causes. The involved believe in fighting their cause and want their goal to be achieved. They are called cyberterrorists.
• Negligence: There are possibilities of not paying attention in protecting the system. This negligence gives the criminals control to damage the computer.
• Revenge or Motivation: The greed to master the complex system with a desire to inflict loss to the victim. This includes youngsters or those who are driven by lust to make quick money and they tamper with data like e-commerce, e-banking or fraud in transactions.
• Poor law Enforcing Bodies: Due to lack in cyber laws of many countries, many criminals get away without being punished.
• Cyber Crimes committed for publicity or recognition: Generally committed by youngsters where they just want to be noticed without hurting someone’s sentiments.

4. Cyber Space Statistics

The fast growth of internet use in world has been accompanied by substantial surge in cybercrime. Smartphones, social media, cloud computing and many other smart devices have increased the demand of Internet, but at the same time have increased the vulnerability to crimes which can harm a person, a society or even a nation. Modern societies live in a cyberspace run by Internet. June 30 2017, there were an estimated 3.84 billion Internet users in the world. Among all Internet users, 49.85% are located in the Asia region. According to stats, China has the most Internet users in the Asia and India, is second largest and, is followed by Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Philippines. Japan has 94% population on internet South Korea 89.4 and Hong Kong 82%, Indian population is catching up to 35%.

As seen from above Internet usage has increased manifolds specifically due to pervasive technology in terms of smart phones, cloud computing, Internet of things and many more. On one side human life is comforted but on the other side Cyber-attacks has gone to the next level. In 2016 we saw “extraordinary attacks, including multi-million-dollar virtual bank heists, overt attempts to disrupt the US electoral process by state-sponsored groups, and some of the biggest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on record powered by a botnet of Internet of Things (IoT) devices”. Now cybercriminals do not just attack assets of an individual but they attack big in terms of robbing a bank stealing millions of dollars.

Cyber Criminals go beyond the imagination as they attack a nation by disrupting its political structure, which was seen recently in US presidential elections. Every new-day witnesses a new variety of attacks like recent WannaCry Ransomware attacks and thousands of such new breed of malwares.

5. Cyber Law

Cyber Law took birth in order to take control over the crimes committed through the internet or the cyberspace or through the uses of computer resources. Description of the lawful issues that are related to the uses of communication or computer technology can be termed as Cyber Law.

5.1 The Information Technology Act 2000

The Information Technology Act, 2000 (also known as ITA-2000, or the IT Act) is an act of the Indian Parliament (no 21 of 2000), it was notified on 17th October 2000. It is the most important law in India that deals with the digital crimes or cyber crimes and electronic commerce. It is based on the United Nations Model Law on Electronic Commerce 1996 (UNCITRAL Model) recommended by the General Assembly of United Nations by a resolution dated 30 January 1997.

Some key points of the Information Technology (IT) Act 2000 are as follows:

• E-mail is now considered as a valid and legal form of communication.
• Digital signatures are given legal validity within the Act.
• Act has given birth to new business to companies to issue digital certificates by becoming the Certifying Authorities.
• This Act allows the government to issue notices on internet through e-governance.
• The communication between the companies or between the company and the government can be done through internet.
• Addressing the issue of security is the most important feature of this Act. It introduced the construct of digital signatures that verifies the identity of an individual on internet.
• In case of any harm or loss done to the company by criminals, the Act provides a remedy in the form of money to the company.

6. Conclusion

It has been deducted from this present study that with increasing rate of cyber crimes more detection techniques along with educating the users on being safe online needs to be established with complete guidance to know about the pros and cons of the web before entering it. There is no doubt that the Internet offers criminals several opportunities. Information is the best form of protection. Concrete measures must be found in order to track electronics evidence and preserve them so that systems are better protected from cyber intrusions. Besides, new cyber laws and policies must be developed by to tackle the various families of cyber crime. Even the companies need to take appropriate measures to investigate and prevent their data.