Cyber Law and Crime

Wangjam Devendra Singh *

How management view their organization security?
Attack at gunpoint, bombing, stealing of goods etc
How employees view their organization security?
Leakage of password to the colleagues, stealing of files, deleting of valuable document etc
How crackers view their organization security?
What if my software source code is stolen, what if my email id is flooded with spontaneous email. What if my organization's bank balance is manipulated? What if my organization's website is defamed with pornographic picture? What if my Integrated circuit design is copied? What if my server is attack by virus/worm/torjan. This is the case where we are going to discuss.

Cyber space is intangible in nature where the things are not all in physical in nature. Theft of traditional goods like gold, money, book, papers are covered by the traditional penal provisions laws. However theft of electronics record remains in the possession of the owner but the content gets stolen. Moreover Cyberspace has no boundary ; a complete disrespect of jurisdictional boundaries.

Hence we need a different law in this dimension. Here borns the cyber law.
Cyber law in India came into force on 17 october 2000 with the IT Act 2000.

Main purpose of the Cyber law 2000 was
1. Legal recognition of e-commerce
2. Electronics filling of records with the government
3. Penalty of cyber crime.
4. Digital signature certifying authority rules.

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS : HACKING:-

Access means gaining entry into, instructing or communicating with the logical, arithmetical, or memory function resources of a computer, computer system or computer network.
Unauthorized access would therefore mean any kind of access without the permission of either the rightful owner or the person in charge of a computer, computer system or computer network.
Every act committed towards breaking into a computer and/or network is hacking. Generally hackers hack for personal monetary gains, such as to stealing the credit card information, transferring money from various bank accounts to their own account followed by withdrawal of money.

TROJAN, VIRUS AND WORM ATTACK :-

Trojan horses disguise themselves as valuable and useful software available for download on the internet. Most people are fooled by this ploy and end up downloading the virus disguised as some other application. The name comes from the mythical "Trojan Horse" that the Ancient Greeks set upon the city of Troy.

Trojans come in two parts, a Client part and a Server part. When the victim (unknowingly) runs the server on its machine, the attacker will then use the Client to connect to the Server and start using the trojan.

A program that has capability to infect other programs and spread with the human action, (such as running an infected program) to keep it spreading is called virus. A program that multiply itseft without intervention of human and eats up all the memory resource are called as worms.

E-MAIL RELATED CRIMES:- 1. Email spoofing
Email spoofing refers to email that appears to have been originated from one source when it was actually sent from another source.
2. Email Spamming
Email "spamming" refers to sending email to thousands and thousands of users - similar to a chain letter.
3 Sending malicious codes through email
E-mails are used to send viruses,Trojans etc through emails as an attachment or by sending a link of website which on visiting downloads malicious code.
4. Email bombing
E-mail "bombing" is characterized by abusers repeatedly sending an identical email message to a particular address.
5. Sending threatening emails
6. Defamatory emails

DENIAL OF SERVICE (DOS) ATTACKS:- Flooding a computer resource with more requests than it can handle. This causes the resource to crash thereby denying access of service to authorized users.

Examples include
attempts to "flood" a network, thereby preventing legitimate network traffic
attempts to disrupt connections between two machines, thereby preventing access to a service
attempts to prevent a particular individual from accessing a service
attempts to disrupt service to a specific system or person.

Types of DOS
There are three basic types of attack:
a. Consumption of scarce, limited, or non-renewable resources like NW bandwith, RAM, CPU time. Even power, cool air, or water can affect.
b. Destruction or Alteration of Configuration Information
c. Physical Destruction or Alteration of Network Components

PORNOGRAPHY:-

The literal mining of the term 'Pornography' is "describing or showing sexual acts in order to cause sexual excitement through books, films, pictures etc." This would include pornographic websites; pornographic material produced using computers and use of internet to download and transmit pornographic videos, pictures, photos, writings etc.

Adult entertainment is largest industry on internet. There are more than 420 million individual pornographic webpages today.

Pedophiles:-
Also there are persons who intentionally prey upon children. Specially with a teen they will let the teen know that fully understand the feelings towards adult and in particular teen parents.
They earns teens trust and gradually seduce them into sexual or indecent acts.
Pedophiles lure the children by distributing pornographic material, then they try to meet them for sex or to take their nude photographs including their engagement in sexual positions.

FORGERY:-

Counterfeit currency notes, postage and revenue stamps, mark sheets etc can be forged using sophisticated computers, printers and scanners. Also impersonate another person is considered forgery.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHT VIOLATIONS:-

These include software piracy, copyright infringement, trademarks violations, theft of computer source code, patent violations. Etc. Cyber Squatting- Domain names are also trademarks and protected by ICANN's domain dispute resolution policy and also under trademark laws. Cyber Squatters registers domain name identical to popular service provider's domain so as to attract their users and get benefit from it.

Cyber Terrorism:-

Targeted attacks on military installations, power plants, air traffic control, banks, trail traffic control, telecommunication networks are the most likely targets. Others like police, medical, fire and rescue systems etc. Cyberterrorism is an attractive option for modern terrorists for several reasons.

1. It is cheaper than traditional terrorist methods.
2. Cyberterrorism is more anonymous than traditional terrorist methods.
3. The variety and number of targets are enormous.
4. Cyberterrorism can be conducted remotely, a feature that is especially appealing to terrorists.
5. Cyberterrorism has the potential to affect directly a larger number of people.

BANKING/CREDIT CARD RELATED CRIMES:-

In the corporate world, Internet hackers are continually looking for opportunities to compromise a company's security in order to gain access to confidential banking and financial information.
Use of stolen card information or fake credit/debit cards are common.
Bank employee can grab money using programs to deduce small amount of money from all customer accounts and adding it to own account also called as salami.

E-COMMERCE/ INVESTMENT FRAUDS:- Sales and Investment frauds. An offering that uses false or fraudulent claims for investments or purchase but services that were purchased or contracted by individuals online are never delivered.
Investors are attracted to invest in this fraudulent scheme by the promises of abnormally high profits.

Sale of illegal articles:-
This would include trade of Drugs, narcotics, weapons and wildlife etc, by posting information on websites, auction websites, and bulletin boards or simply by using email communication.

ONLINE GAMBLING:-

There are millions of websites hosted on servers abroad, that offer online gambling. In fact, it is believed that many of these websites are actually run for money laundering ( to make black money white).

DEFAMATION: - Defamation can be understood as the intentional infringement of another person's right to his good name.
Cyber Defamation occurs when defamation takes place with the help of computers and / or the Internet. E.g. someone publishes defamatory matter about someone on a website or sends e-mails containing defamatory information to all of that person's friends.

CYBER STACKING:-

Cyber stalking involves following a persons movements across the Internet by posting messages (sometimes threatening) on the bulletin boards frequented by the victim, entering the chat-rooms frequented by the victim, constantly bombarding the victim with emails etc. In general, the harasser intends to cause emotional distress and has no legitimate purpose to his communications.

DATA DIDDLING:-

Data diddling involves changing data prior or during input into a computer.
It also include changing the financial information for some time before processing and then restoring original information.

Since all sensitive information that is mostly stored on a computer that is connected to the Internet, there is a need for information assurance and security. So in order to have Cyber Security, everyone should follow the Cyber Security standards that enable us to protect various cyber threat