Types of computer crimes
Date: November 26, 2005Source: Computer Crime Research Center
Computer Crime, E-Crime, Hi-Tech Crime or Electronic Crime is a crime in which a computer plays an essential part.
This type of crime is the illegal exploitation of computer technologies, usually involving the Internet, to support crimes such as fraud, identity theft, sharing of information, and embezzlement.
Exactly what is illegal varies greatly from territory to territory. Consequently, the growth of international data communications and in particular the Internet has made these crimes both more common and more difficult to police. Luckily there are people fighting computer crime and it is taken very seriously by government agencies. See below for a link to the U.S. Department of Justice's website about e-crime and their computer forensics activities.
Examples of computer crime are:
* Fraud achieved by the manipulation of computer records.
* Spamming wherever outlawed completely or where regulations controlling it are violated.
* Deliberate circumvention of computer security systems.
* Unauthorised access to or modification of
o programs (see software cracking and hacking).
o data.
* Intellectual property theft, including software piracy.
* Industrial espionage by means of access to or theft of computer materials.
* Identity theft where this is accomplished by use of fraudulent computer transactions.
* Writing or spreading computer viruses or worms.
* Salami slicing is the practice of stealing money repeatedly in extremely small quantities
* Denial-of-service attack, where company websites are flooded with service requests and their website is overloaded and either slowed or crashes completely
* Making and digitally distributing child pornography
Computer crime is a felony violation of section 1030 of the United States Code.
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