Cyber Crime: Definition, Classification, Statistics

In the current era of digitization and with the rapid advancements in technologies, our life is becoming more and more dependent on the internet. Everything is on the Internet, be it business, education, shopping, or banking transactions. Some threats are posed by this enormous rise in digitization, which is creating a new set of global concerns called cyber-crime. These crimes can take place in many forms, like phishing, identity theft, social engineering, and online scams, which are a big concern for all users. This paper recognizes the importance of being familiar with the effects of cybercrime, keeping in mind the recent advancements that have taken place and offering solutions to protect oneself from it. Moreover, describing the need to be cyber-safe and how such unethical activities can be a problem for us. This paper also reviews the current technologies for cyber criminal activities and hi-tech technologies that need to be adopted to prevent people from getting webbed.

Keywords: Cyber Crime, Internet, Information Security.

1. Introduction

The Internet can be defined as the collection of many computers that provide a network of electronic connections between them. Although the Internet has its huge set of advantages in every field, it has one major disadvantage: cybercrime. Cybercrime involves a computer and a network. The computer can be used to carry out the crime or to target it.

The hacker or cybercriminal may use a device to access user’s personal data, business information, identities etc. Every year, cybercrimes are affecting several businesses, losing millions of money and harming companies’ reputations, leading to loss of future business as well. In today's world, cyber systems provide flexibility leading to its illicit use. The Government's Internet policy, the Internet along with making life easy with economic activities like buying, selling, online transactions, and social networking, brings along many threats. Hacking tools are available on the internet, which does not require people to be highly skilled and also encourages them to do inappropriate acts online. Thus, cyberspace has made users vulnerable, making it important to take necessary steps and avoid exposure from these acts. Highly populated countries like Asia and China depend on web resources, which creates opportunities to commit such crimes and makes it difficult to detect and prevent Internet Crimes in the wide networking environment.

2. Cyber Crime

Sussman and Heuston first proposed the term “Cyber Crime” in the year 1995. Cybercrime cannot be described as a single definition, it is best considered as a collection of acts or conducts. These acts are based on the material offence object affecting computer data or systems. These are illegal acts where a digital device or information system is a tool or a target, or it can combine both. Cybercrime is also known as electronic crimes, computer-related crimes, e-crime, high-technology crimes, information-age crimes, etc.

In simple terms, we can describe “Cyber Crime” as the offenses or crimes occurring over electronic communications or information systems. These crimes are illegal activities involving a computer and a network. Due to the development of the internet, the volume of cybercrime activities are also increasing because when committing a crime, there is no longer a need for the physical presence of the criminal. The unusual characteristic of cybercrime is that the victim and the offender may never come into direct contact. Cybercriminals often opt to operate from countries with non-existent or weak cybercrime laws in order to reduce the chances of detection and prosecution. There is a myth among people that cyber crimes can only be committed over cyberspace or the internet. In fact, cyber crimes can also be committed without one's involvement in cyberspace; it is not necessary that the cyber criminal should remain present online. Software privacy can be taken as an example.

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2.1. Evolution of Cyber Crime

Cybercrime has evolved from Morris Worm to ransomware. Many countries, including India, are working to stop such crimes or attacks, but these attacks are continuously changing and affecting our nation.

• 1997 - Cybercrimes and viruses initiated, including Morris Code worm and others.
• 2004 - Malicious code, Torjan, Advanced worm etc.
• 2007 - Identifying thieves, Phishing, etc.
• 2010 - DNS Attack, Rise of Botnets, SQL attacks etc.
• 2013 - Social Engineering, DOS Attacks, BotNets, Malicious Emails, Ransomware attacks, etc.
• 2015 - Present Banking Malware, Keylogger, Bitcoin wallet, Phone hijacking, Anroid hack, Cyber warfare etc.

2.2. Classification of Cyber Crime

Cyber Crime can be classified into four major categories. They are as follows:

1. a) Cyber Crime against individuals: Crimes that are committed by cyber criminals against an individual or a person. A few cyber crime against individuals are:

• Email spoofing: This technique is a forgery of an email header. This means that the message appears to have received from someone or somewhere other than the genuine or actual source. These tactics are usually used in spam campaigns or in phishing, because people are probably going to open an electronic mail or an email when they think that the email has been sent by a legitimate source.
• Spamming: Email spam, which is otherwise called junk email. It is an unsought mass message sent through email. The use of spam became popular in the mid-1990s, and it is a problem faced by most email users nowadays. Recipient’s email addresses are obtained by spam bots, automated programs that crawl the internet in search of email addresses. The spammers use spam bots to create email distribution lists. With the expectation of receiving a few number of respond a spammer typically sends an email to millions of email addresses.
• Cyber defamation: Cyber defamation means harming an individual's reputation in the eyes of others through cyberspace. The purpose of making a defamatory statement is to bring down the reputation of the individual.

1. b) Cyber Crime against property: These crimes include vandalism of computers, Intellectual (Copyright, patented, trademark, etc.) Property Crimes, Online threats, etc. Intellectual property crime includes:

• Software piracy: It can be described as the unauthorized copying of software.
• Copyright infringement can be defined as the infringement of an individual or organization's copyright. In simpler terms, it can also be defined as the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials such as music, software, text, etc.
• Trademark infringement: It can be described as the using of a service mark or trademark unauthorizedly.

1. c) Cyber Crime against organizations: Cybercrime against organizations are as follows:

• Unauthorized changing or deleting of data.
• Reading or copying of confidential information unauthorizedly.
• DOS Attack: In this attack, the attacker floods the servers, systems or networks with traffic in order to overwhelm the victim resources and make it infeasible or difficult for the users to use them.

3. Causes of Cyber Crime

• Ease of access: The problem encountered in guarding a computer system against unauthorized access is that there is every possibility of violating the technology by stealing access codes, recorders, pins, retina imagers, etc., that can be used to fool biometric systems and bypassing firewalls to get past many security systems.
• Cyber Hoaxes: Cyber Crimes can be committed just to cause threats or damage one's reputation. This is the most dangerous of all causes. The involved believe in fighting their cause and want their goal to be achieved. They are called cyberterrorists.
• Negligence: There are possibilities of not paying attention in protecting the system. This negligence gives the criminals control to damage the computer.
• Revenge or Motivation: The greed to master the complex system with a desire to inflict loss on the victim. This includes youngsters or those who are driven by a lust for quick money and tamper with data like e-commerce, e-banking, or fraud in transactions.
• Poor Law-Enforcing Bodies: Due to the lack of cyber laws in many countries, many criminals get away without being punished.
• Cyber Crimes committed for publicity or recognition: Generally committed by youngsters who just want to be noticed without hurting someone's sentiments.

4. Cyber Space Statistics

The fast growth of internet use worldwide has been accompanied by a substantial surge in cybercrime. Smartphones, social media, cloud computing, and many other smart devices have increased the demand for the Internet, but at the same time, they have increased the vulnerability to crimes that can harm a person, a society, or even a nation. Modern societies live in cyberspace, run by the Internet. On June 30, 2017, there were an estimated 3.84 billion Internet users worldwide. Among all Internet users, 49.85% are located in the Asia region. According to stats, China has the most Internet users in Asia and India, is second largest and is followed by Japan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), and the Philippines. Japan has 94% of the population on the internet, South Korea 89.4 and Hong Kong 82%, and the Indian population is catching up to 35%.

As seen above, Internet usage has increased manifolds, specifically due to pervasive technology in terms of smartphones, cloud computing, the Internet of things, and many more. On one side human life is comforted but on the other side Cyber-attacks has gone to the next level. In 2016 we saw “extraordinary attacks, including multi-million-dollar virtual bank heists, overt attempts to disrupt the US electoral process by state-sponsored groups, and some of the biggest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on record powered by a botnet of Internet of Things (IoT) devices”. Now, cybercriminals do not just attack an individual's assets, but they attack big in terms of robbing a bank and stealing millions of dollars.

Cyber Criminals go beyond the imagination as they attack a nation by disrupting its political structure, which was seen recently in US presidential elections. Every new day witnesses a new variety of attacks like recent WannaCry Ransomware attacks and thousands of such new breeds of malware.

5. Cyber Law

Cyber Law was born to control crimes committed through the Internet, cyberspace, or computer resources. Cyberlaw describes the lawful issues related to communication or computer technology.

5.1 The Information Technology Act 2000

The Information Technology Act, 2000 (also known as ITA-2000 or the IT Act) is an act of the Indian Parliament (no 21 of 2000); it was notified on 17th October 2000. It is the most important law in India that deals with the digital crimes or cyber crimes and electronic commerce. It is based on the United Nations Model Law on Electronic Commerce 1996 (UNCITRAL Model) recommended by the General Assembly of the United Nations by a resolution dated 30 January 1997.

Some key points of the Information Technology (IT) Act 2000 are as follows:

• E-mail is now considered as a valid and legal form of communication.
• Digital signatures are given legal validity within the Act.
• Act has given birth to new businesses and companies to issue digital certificates by becoming the Certifying Authorities.
• This Act allows the government to issue notices on the internet through e-governance.
• Communication between the companies or between the company and the government can be done through the Internet.
• Addressing the issue of security is the most important feature of this Act. It introduced the construct of digital signatures that verifies an individual's identity on internet.
• In case of any harm or loss done to the company by criminals, the Act provides a remedy in the form of money to the company.

6. Conclusion

It has been deducted from this present study that with the increasing rate of cyber crimes, more detection techniques along with educating the users on being safe online needs to be established with complete guidance to know about the pros and cons of the web before entering it. There is no doubt that the Internet offers criminals several opportunities. Information is the best form of protection. Concrete measures must be found to track and preserve electronics evidence so that systems are better protected from cyber intrusions. Besides, new cyber laws and policies must be developed to tackle the various families of cybercrime. Even companies need to take appropriate measures to investigate and protect their data.