Cyber crime can involve criminal activities that are traditional in nature, such as theft, fraud, forgery, defamation and mischief, all of which are subject to the Indian Penal Code. The abuse of computers has also given birth to a gamut of new age crimes that are addressed by the Information Technology Act, 2000.
Defining cyber crimes, as “acts that are punishable by the Information Technology Act” would be unsuitable as the Indian Penal Code also covers many cyber crimes, such as email spoofing and cyber defamation, sending threatening emails etc.
A simple yet sturdy definition of cyber crime would be “unlawful acts wherein the computer is either a tool or a target or both”.
Some examples are:
Financial crimes
This would include cheating, credit card frauds, money laundering etc.
Misappropriation of funds by manipulation of computer records was reported, wherein Punjab National Bank was cheated to the tune of Rs. 1.39 crores through false debits and credits in computerized accounts. In another case, Rs. 2.5 lakhs were misappropriated from Bank of Baroda through falsification of computerized bank accounts.
Cyber pornography
This would include pornographic websites; pornographic magazines produced using computers (to publish and print the material) and the Internet (to download and transmit pornographic pictures, photos, writings etc).
Recent Indian incidents revolving around cyber pornography include the Air Force Balbharati School case.
In the first case of this kind, the Delhi Police Cyber Crime Cell registered a case under section 67 of the IT act, 2000.
Sale of illegal articles:
This would include sale of narcotics, weapons and wildlife etc., by posting information on websites, auction websites, and bulletin boards or simply by using email communication. E.g. many of the auction sites even in India are believed to be selling cocaine in the name of ‘honey’.
Online gambling:
There are millions of websites; all hosted on servers abroad, that offer online gambling. In fact, it is believed that many of these websites are actually fronts for money laundering.
Cases of hawala transactions and money laundering over the Internet have been reported. Whether these sites have any relationship with drug trafficking is yet to be explored.
Intellectual Property crimes
These include software piracy, copyright infringement, trademarks violations, theft of computer source code etc.
Bharti Cellular Ltd. filed a case in the Delhi High Court that some cyber squatters had registered domain names such as barticellular.com and bhartimobile.com with Network solutions under different fictitious names. The court directed Network Solutions not to transfer the domain names in question to any third party and the matter is sub-judice.
Email spoofing
A spoofed email is one that appears to originate from one source but actually has been sent from another source.
Cyber Defamation:
This 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.
India’s first case of cyber defamation was reported when a company’s employee started sending derogatory, defamatory and obscene e-mails about its Managing Director. The e-mails were anonymous and frequent, and were sent to many of their business associates to tarnish the image and goodwill of the company.
The company was able to identify the employee with the help of a private computer expert and moved the Delhi High Court.
Unauthorized access to computer systems or networks:
This activity is commonly referred to as hacking. The Indian law has, however, given a different connotation to the term hacking, so we will not use the term “unauthorized access” interchangeably with the term “hacking”. However, as per Indian law, unauthorized access does occur, if hacking has taken place.
Theft of information contained in electronic form
This includes information stored in computer hard disks, removable storage media etc.
Email bombing
Email bombing refers to sending a large number of emails to the victim resulting in the victim’s email account (in case of an individual) or mail servers (in case of a company or an email service provider) crashing.
In one case, a foreigner who had been residing in Simla, India for almost thirty years wanted to avail of a scheme introduced by the Simla Housing Board to buy land at lower rates. When he made an application it was rejected on the grounds that the scheme was available only for citizens of India. He decided to take his revenge. Consequently he sent thousands of mails to the Simla Housing Board and repeatedly kept sending e-mails till their servers crashed.
Data diddling
This kind of an attack involves altering raw data just before it is processed by a computer and then changing it back after the processing is completed. Electricity Boards in India have been victims to data diddling programs inserted when private parties were computerizing their systems.
Salami attacks
These attacks are used for the commission of financial crimes. The key here is to make the alteration so insignificant that in a single case it would go completely unnoticed. E.g. a bank employee inserts a program, into the bank’s servers, that deducts a small amount of money from the account of every customer. No account holder will probably notice this unauthorized debit, but the bank employee will make a sizeable amount of money every month.
Logic bombs
These are event dependent programs. This implies that these programs are created to do something only when a certain event (known as a trigger event) occurs.
Web jacking
This occurs when someone forcefully takes control of a website (by cracking the password and later changing it). The actual owner of the website does not have any more control over what appears on that website.
thts gud u tell us about these crimes but how we can stop it
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