Cybercrime

From ArticleWorld

Cybercrime generally refers to criminal activity involving computers and computers network, as target or place. It is difficult to classify cybercrime as a type of crime by itself. In general, cybercrime is used with a more general connotation, describing spamming, intellectual property theft and many others.

Cybercrime is also used to refer to criminal activity against a computer system or a computer network, like obtaining unauthorized access on a system, running malicious code or launching denial-of-service attacks.

Some cybercrimes have regular users as targets. These may include securities fraud, identity theft or the famous Nigerian 419 scams.

Forms

Among the ones mentioned above, the most common cybecrimes are:

• Denial-of-service attacks against commercial websites, along with obtaining unauthorized access on such servers.
• The release of viruses, trojan horse programs and other types of spyware and malware software
• Cyberterrorism and information warfare
• Industrial and economic espionage
• Identity theft and phishing
• Online harassment and cyberstalking.

Classifying an infraction as cybercrime is not something done by special criteria, which is why there are no actual laws against cybercrime itself, but rather against infractions that can qualify, in certain situations, as cybercrimes. The term itself is more of a popular term and less of a legal term. For example, identity theft is not necessarily a cybercrime, although it can be done through computers and computers network. At the same time, in addition to identity theft, there are other infractions that can be qualified as cybercrimes.

Laws against cybercrime

Many developed countries have comprehensive law sets against cybercrime. For example, at the time of writing, there are 11 federal laws against cybercrime in the USA, and most of states have their own legislation referring to cybercrime. The European Union also has its own legislation set.

Cybercrime is fairly common at the moment, making it an important field of law. This is the reason why many universities have courses that treat cybercrimes separately.