Computer Crime
Computer crime refers to all law offenses that involve using computers. Like every aspect in life, computer world has a bright side and of course a downside. The bright side is that computer fosters the development of society all together. Communication, technological advancement, the capacity of executing some jobs assisted by computers improve our life style and raise its quality.
The dark side is that as computer technology becomes a public domain people all over the world get connected to the internet services. Some of these people don’t have a moral standard that will prevent them from becoming Internet criminals.
The most commom computer crimes are hacking into someone else’s computer to the purpose of taking advantage in every way of their information stored there and the uploading of viruses which creates huge damage to individual users or/and to companies and, hypothetically (so far, thank God!), to entire countries. There are other computer crimes that can be committed through computer use, and we are going to list them.
A very devious computer crime is the contruction of sites that have an obscene or offensive content. The Internet is full of sites with racist, sexist, blasphemous content. This kind of sites ranges from skin heads to the radical Islamist sites, from KKK sites to African conspirationist sites, and so on. Inciting to sedition or hate crime through Internet constitutes a crime also.
A very important part of the offensive activity on the internet is child pornography. Child pornography is a crime in all developed societies. As a consequence, computer child pornography is a hideous crime and is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Harassment is another crime that can be commited through computers. It is considered a crime the direction of insidious comments to people of different classes: religious minorities, sexual minorities, religious majorities, gender comments. A specific kind of harassment is the insidious pursuit of individual users by sending them threats through email or through messenger.
A very serious fraud committed through the Internet is drog trafficking. Drog trafficking operates mostly on a face-to-face base; it has no need for advertising, publicity, public stores. Internet is a perfect way to meet people and lure them into drog comsumption with high chances to avoid detection, at least in the early stages of this enterprise.
Cyborterrorism is a special computer crime type. American Federal Government voiced a concern regarding the fact that during the last years the exposure of some national informatic systems that ensure the functioning of the American society has reached critical levels as some cyber terrorists have tried to punch holes into the national security system. This kind of terrorism is practiced mainly by organized people such as terrorist organizations, intelligence services working for totalitarian countries.
Cyber warfare is the ultimate form of computer crime. Unfortunately, this kind of activity is supported by some governments or large organizations.
Written by hugepedia, date Jun 13, 2010 in Computer Fraud
3 comments
The truth is that hackers come up with the most amazing metods of ripping people off. I just found out about phishing and I would like to warn everybody of the risks. Hackers develop websites which are identical to those of popular banks and then they e-mail people telling them the bank is updating customer information and they redirect you to the fake website where you are required to submit your personal data and fill in a form with bank account information. I figured this was a scam because I receive such an e-mail from a back which was different than mine and I thought “why would these guys ask me for information update if I am not using their services”. I telephoned that bank to see if maybe my wife had opened an account without me knowing and they told me to be really careful. “A bank will never contact you by e-mail to request personal information. We generally telephone our customers and tell them to go to the nearest bank if we need their personal data. We never collect it by phone or e-mail. This is a scam!”. This is what the bank operator told me! Beware of these computers scams my friends
I reached your site via Yahoo search engine during searching for the word Cyber Crime. I should say that you really have a very decent one. Are you planning to write anything more articles about Online Thefts? I might just bookmark your site. Appreciate it!