What is cyber crime?

What is cyber crime?

The internet offers a wealth of information, entertainment, tools, and access to the world for millions of users. But it also fosters an underground world of crime filled with fraud, scams, theft, and even perversion.

Cyber crime is basically any act that would be against the law in the physical world that takes part on the internet. Cyber crime can include things such as identity theft, scams designed to steal money, hacking and virus making to wreak havoc on computer systems, child pornography, and pedophiles.

The most well known form of cyber crime comes in the form of criminals stealing credit card information and other sensitive information through various ways such as phishing, fake e-mails, fake bank log in websites, key-loggers, and brute force hacking. Most of these techniques designed to get personal information, credit card numbers, and bank account information can be stopped by simple precautions such as verifying the site you are about to log into is in fact the real site, ignoring and deleting all e-mails (and IMs) that seem suspicious, too good to be true, or claim to be from a bank or other company that holds sensitive information as these organizations will never contact you asking for your log-in information or account numbers.

Things such as key-loggers, brute force hacking, and phishing websites can be avoided by keeping your browser and anti-virus software up to date. Common sense is also a good tool against those looking to steal what is generally financially sensitive information. E-mails promising you a cut of millions of dollars if you only give the sender all your information are clearly criminal and trying to steal your hard earned money. E-mails that seem to come from legitimate businesses should be looked at closely; a popular example is of the site Pay-Pal.com whose users often receive fake e-mails from addresses such as service@PAYPAY.C0M and similar addresses where the difference is often small. In my example the capital letters hide the fact that the 'o' in .com is actually a zero. You should also always type in web addresses directly as some hackers use programs to silently slightly change web addresses to pages that only look real.

Other cyber criminals focus on wreaking havoc on the internet, think of it like cyber vandalism. These hackers get a rise out of causing system crashes, slowing down internet productivity, controlling computers remotely, and in general just irritating internet users.

Then there are the child pornography consumers and providers along with pedophiles. This form of cyber crime is dangerous in that it often targets children and teenagers, whole underground rings of groups work to find children for child pornography and pedophiles troll the internet chat rooms and sites such as MySpace pretending to be someone else in hopes of luring a child or teenager into their presence. Many task forces exist to combat this growing problem, but with the overall anonymity of the internet, anyone can be who they say they are and the problem only grows with more and more resources available for those looking to take advantage of children.

The internet is often seen as a digital reflection of the real, physical world which is filled with good and bad. Crime will occur anywhere that there is the opportunity for it to occur. Law enforcement and watchful web surfers as well as departments in financial institutions and computer security firms work together to monitor and reduce the levels of cyber crime. The internet can be a great resource and a fun world to explore, but a certain level of vigilance has to be maintained.