Internet crimes are on the rise! In the 90's, technology is rapidly increasing, and along with the advancement of the Internet, criminals are making great use of technology. Criminals who prefer to be called "hackers" or "phreaks" are examples of these high-tech abusers. There are several types of crimes that are committed on-line. Credit card fraud, espionage, software piracy, E-mail bombing, child pornography, spoofing, stealing passwords, Network break-ins and more.
The U.S. Secret Service believes that half a billion dollars may be lost annually by consumers who have credit card and calling card numbers stolen from on-line databases. Security measures are improving, and traditional methods of law enforcement seem to be sufficient for prosecuting the thieves of such information. Bulletin boards and other on-line services are frequent targets for hackers who want to access large databases of credit card information. Such attacks usually result in the implementation of stronger security systems. Some sites have a cheap form on the web page where you would enter your information and credit card #. I remember that one site http://www.sausage.com/where you would download a program for a 14 day trial period. To get full use of the software you needed a registration code. You could then go to http://www.hotmail.com/and make up an E-mail address using false information, and get an E-mail address, then go back to sausage.com and fill out the registration for and give the new E-mail address created where it's asked for, and for the credit card # enter 000000000000 and 01/00 for the expiry date of the "Visa" card. Use Mike Smith for the card holders name, and abra cad abra, within a couple minutes you have the registration code for the program. You've just saved yourself at least $25 US up to $99.00 US. Now Sausage Software has gotten smart and that little trick doesn't work anymore. They've added a more secure, and sophisticated transaction method. I haven't heard of a hole to get freebies yet
Corporations, like governments, love to spy on the enemy. Networked systems provide new opportunities for this, as hackers-for-hire retrieve information about product development and marketing strategies, rarely leaving behind any evidence of the theft. Not only is tracing the criminal labor-intensive, convictions are hard to obtain when laws are not written with electronic theft in mind.
According to estimates by the U.S. Software Publisher's Association, as much as $7.5 billion of American software may be illegally copied and distributed annually worldwide. These copies work as well as the originals, and sell for significantly less money. Piracy is relatively easy, and only the largest rings of distributors are usually caught. Moreover, software pirates know that they are unlikely to serve hard jail time when prisons are overcrowded with people convicted of more serious crimes. A lot of software piracy happens among peers. Students at school, and colleagues at work could easily pirate software to each other on a regular basis. A lot of students get pirated software video games, or applications which are fairly expensive such as Auto CAD which is a few hundred dollars. Students don't have large sums of money to spend on programs, so it's so much easier to get it free, and as from what I know, none of the people I know that were pirating software have been caught. It's not easy to catch these software stealing bandits.
This is one crime that is clearly illegal, both on and off the Internet. Crackdowns may catch some offenders, but there are still ways to acquire images of children in varying stages of dress and performing a variety of sexual acts. Legally speaking, people who use or provide access to child porn face the same charges whether the images are digital or on a piece of photographic paper. Trials of network users arrested in a recent FBI bust may challenge the validity of those laws as they apply to online services. This is one issue that parents are very fearful of their children finding on-line. Parents are concerned about the child seeing these images, or perhaps being in a chat-room and being lured to run away like many of the stories you hear about on the news. Parents now take great caution about what content their children see, but sometimes curious minds wander, possibly leading to trouble. Contrary to what you may hear, this type of thing isn't as common as the media makes it out to be, but it's still a problem.
Software can be written that will instruct a computer to do almost anything, and terrorism has hit the Internet in the form of mail bombings. One such program is called "Flamethrower". By instructing a computer to repeatedly send electronic mail (email) to a specified person's email address, the cybercriminal can overwhelm the recipient's personal account and potentially shut down entire systems. This is also referred to as "spamming". This may or may not be illegal, but it is certainly disruptive. Well-known journalists Joshua Quittner and Michelle Slatalla learned the hard way what it feels like to be targeted by mail bombs when their home computer was flooded with gibberish and their phone lines were re-routed for a weekend.
I've tried this just to imitate someone in a chat room as a joke, didn't get it to work though. Spoofing is the act of disguising one computer to electronically "look" like another computer in order to gain access to a system that would normally be restricted. Legally, this can be handled in the same manner as password sniffers, but the law will have to change if spoofing is going to be addressed with more than a quick-fix solution.
Password sniffers are programs that monitor and record the name and password of network users as they log in, jeopardizing security at a site. Whoever installs the sniffer can then impersonate an authorized user and log in to access restricted documents. Laws are not yet set up to adequately prosecute a person for impersonating another user on-line, but laws designed to prevent unauthorized access to information may be effective in apprehending hackers using sniffer programs. The Wall Street Journal suggests in recent reports that hackers may have sniffed out passwords used by members of America OnLine, also referred to as AOL, a service with more than 3.5 million subscribers. If the reports are accurate, even the president of the service found his account security jeopardized.
Using software tools installed on a computer in a remote location, hackers can break into computer systems to steal data, plant viruses or trojan horses, or work mischief of a less serious sort by changing user names or passwords. Network intrusions have been made illegal by the U.S. federal government, but detection and enforcement are difficult.
Crime on the Internet continues to this day, although laws have been formed, but with no physical way to enforce these laws, hackers, phreaks and other offenders still get away with credit card fraud, E-mail bombings, child pornography, spoofing, password sniffing, espionage, software piracy, breaking into computer networks amongst other, less common crimes.