Computer Crime

Computer crime, or cybercrime, refers to any crime that involves a computer and a network. The computer may have been used in the commission of a crime, or it may be the target. Issues surrounding this type of crime have become high-profile, particularly those surrounding cracking, copyright infringement, child pornography, and child grooming. There are also problems of privacy when confidential information is lost or intercepted, lawfully or otherwise.

 Internationally, both governmental and non-state actors engage in cybercrimes, including espionage, financial theft, and other cross-border crimes. Activity crossing international borders and involving the interests of at least one nation state is sometimes referred to as cyber warfare. The international legal system is attempting to hold actors accountable for their actions through the International Criminal Court.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) notes that cyberspace has emerged as a national-level concern through several recent events of geo-strategic significance. Among those are included the attack on Estonia's infrastructure in 2007, allegedly by Russian hackers. "In August 2008, Russia again allegedly conducted cyber attacks, this time in a coordinated and synchronized kinetic and non-kinetic campaign against the country of Georgia. Fearing that such attacks may become the norm in future warfare among nation-states, the concept of cyberspace operations impacts and will be adapted by warfighting military commanders in the future.

Documented Cases:

One of the highest profiled banking computer crime occurred during a course of three years beginning in 1970. The chief teller at the Park Avenue branch of New York's Union Dime Savings Bank embezzled over $1.5 million from hundreds of accounts.

 A hacking group called the MOD (Masters of Deception), allegedly stole passwords and technical data from Pacific Bell, Nynex, and other telephone companies as well as several big credit agencies and two major universities. The damage caused was extensive, one company, Southwestern Bell suffered losses of $370,000 alone.

In February 2000 a individual going by the alias of MafiaBoy began a series denial-of-service attacks against high profile websites, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. About fifty computers at Stanford University, and also computers at the University of California at Santa Barbara, were amongst the zombie computers sending pings in DDoS attacks. On 3 August 2000, Canadian federal prosecutors charged MafiaBoy with 54 counts of illegal access to computers, plus a total of ten counts of mischief to data for his attacks.

In August 2010 the international investigation Operation Delego, operating under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, shut down the international pedophile ring Dreamboard. The website had approximately 600 members, and may have distributed up to 123 terabytes of child pornography (roughly equivalent to 16,000 DVDs). To date this is the single largest U.S. prosecution of an international child pornography ring; 52 arrests were made worldwide.

Attack of the Malware

Malware, short for MALicious softWARE, is a computer program designed to gather information that leads to abusive behavior resulting in loss of privacy and  unauthorized access to systems.  Malware’s most common pathway from criminals to users is through the internet, mostly through the use of websites and through email.  Some people think of malware as another form of virus, and although it might be similar to the way they replicate I find them to be a lot more dangerous.

Malware is not the same as defective software, that is, software that has a legitimate purpose but contains harmful bugs. Sometimes, malware is disguised as genuine software, and may come from an official site. Therefore, some security programs, such as McAfee may call malware "potentially unwanted programs" or "PUP".

In Law, some U.S. states, including California and West Virginia know malware by the term computer contaminant.  According to F-Secure as much malware was produced in 2007 as in the previous 20 years altogether.

The frequency of malware as a vehicle for organized Internet crime, along with the general inability of traditional anti-malware protection platforms to protect against the continuous stream of unique and newly produced malware, has seen the adoption of a new mindset for businesses operating on the Internet. Microsoft reported in May 2011 that every one in 14 downloads from the Internet may now contain malware code, according to the Wall Street Journal. Social media, and Facebook in particular, is seeing a rise in new tactics for spreading harm to computers.

Most malwares are design to steal personal and or financial data so the hacker could perform fraudulent transactions for example Albert Gonzalez (not to be confused with the U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez) is accused of masterminding a ring to use malware to steal and sell more than 170 million credit card numbers in 2006 and 2007—the largest computer fraud in history. Among the firms targeted were BJ's Wholesale Club, TJX, DSW Shoes, OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, Boston Market, Sports Authority and Forever 21.

Computer Viruses

A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. A virus today could spread much more rapidly than in early computer age due to the Internet.  In the old days for a virus to spread from one computer to another usually was though the use of removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB drive.

A virus has to use an infection strategy in order to replicate itself.  The most common replication strategy is for it to attach itself to executable programs.  In the windows environment it would attach itself to an executable program and then it will call itself through the use of an executable key in the Widows Registry.

Viruses have gotten so advanced in our computer era that they could replicate through the internet in the form of advertisement or attaching them self to a video file such as an .avi format video file.

Most virus try to go undetected by being so small that they might not change the size of the infected file and for that reason making it very difficult to be detected.  Others try to kill the task of the antivirus program so that the antivirus can’t find them.

There are many different types of recovery options once you have a virus.  These options depend on the virus you’ve acquired.  Some virus could be removed by running the antivirus software you have and following the prompts for removal, others will require some manual interaction, and others might be so deep in your operating system and have damaged so many files that the only form of recovery is to re-install the operating system.

It is a must for every computer to have Antivirus software installed, and making sure that the definition files are updated on a daily basis to protect itself and your information from being infected with a virus.

Computer Errors or Bugs

Bugs are the beginning of Computer Crimes, because hackers look for bugs to get inside the computer and create their crime.  For this reason we are going to go over what Computer bugs are this way you have an understanding of what hackers are after.

Computer errors or bugs are terms used to describe that a computer hardware or software has an error, mistake or some kind of fault.  Since you are asking about software I’ll keep my answers related to software errors or bugs.  There are many places where a software bug could be generated, but I could say that 100 percent of all computer bugs are the cause of human error.

 You could be the programmer developing software and if you are the only programmer then you might have control of the entire software you are writing, and still make some small mistakes.  The smallest error or bug I could think of is misspelled words, of course a misspelled word is not a major bug, the program is not going to stop working but it’s still a bug.  It could also be common to mix subroutines in your program like “view” and “review” or “print” and "print view”. 

Another common error would be to be off by one byte while reading or writing a file, one byte might seem like no big deal but in a software program every character counts and you might start losing words just by this. There are also logical bugs which usually make the program get stuck in one place or give you wrong mathematical calculations.  There might be some interface bugs that cause errors in display, or communication devices. The most dangerous bug I could think of would be a security bug.  Security bugs make the software or computer system vulnerable, and depending on the kind of software you are writing it could be very dangerous for the individual or organization running the software.  Now if you are developing the software in a team, imagine to what extend the errors could be made.  At that level even a small design error could miss an entire process of the program, it would be like building a figure puzzle and missing just one tile, the picture is never going to be complete.  Another place where the error could be taking place is at the compiler that you are using to compile the program.  The compiler is  a very complex program also written by humans exposed to having errors, and this program is supposed to translate the syntax oriented high level language that you wrote the program in like (basic, Delphi, C, Java to name a few) and convert it to computer code, basically binary code only understood by the computer.

 There are many errors reported by compilers that would just make you work for endless hours and not even be a problem on your actual code.  We could now think we have a perfect compiler, and perfect software developed by you or your team of programmers, well that software now has to run on top of an operating system that might have many bugs of its own.  Take Windows for example, I would dare to say it’s the most popular OS in the PC world, and everyone knows how buggy it is.  You always have to be getting Updates.  These updates are what Microsoft uses to send fixes to the bugs they find on a daily basis.  Sometimes you get the bug solved, others you might get a work around until they fix the problem.  When they fix a very big amount of bugs they will package them all into something called service pack, the latest Microsoft OS right now is Windows 7 SP1.