COMPUTER CRIME

“Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.”

- W. Clement Stone

Nowadays, computers and Internet make many activities easier for us, thus, this also make many illegal and unethical actions easier for criminals such as:

      The distribution of child pornography

      Copyright infringement

      Stock manipulation

      And various other crimes

Computer present new challenges for prevention, detection and prosecution of crimes. Criminals can steal, commit fraud or destroy data from miles away or from another country, via modem.They somehow release computer viruses; steal sensitive personal, business and government information; steal money; crash Web sites; destroy files; and disrupt businesses.

As we hear the word “hacking” it is easy to conclude that it is an illegal, irresponsible, destructive and unethical doings which may affect others.  On the other hand, it varies two definitions to better understand what hacking really means. First, hacking refers to the hobby/ profession of working with computers and the second one is that it refers to breaking computer systems which depect to negative side.

Hacking also has three phases to consider:                          

Phase 1:  

     

      the early years (1960’s and 1970’s), when hacking was a positive term;

      the joy of programming

      “hacker” was a creative programmer who wrote very elegant or clever programs.

      hackers were called “computer virtuosos”

Jude Milhon – described hacking as “clever circumvention of imposed limits.”

Phase 2: 

 

      the period from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, when hacking took on its more negative meanings;

      the word “hacking” took on its most common meaning today: breaking into computers on which the hacker does not have authorized access.

Kevin Mitnick – is one of the notorious hackers of the 1980’s.

Robert T. Morris – wrote a worm program and released it onto the Internet.

Phase 3:

      the Web era

      beginning in the mid-1990’s with the growth of the Web and of e-commerce and the participation of a large portion of the general public online.

      within about a week in 2000, almost a dozen of major Web sites were shut down, some for several hours by denial-of-service attack.

Dan Farmer – ran a program to probe 1700 sites of  banks, newspapers, government agencies                          and pornography sellers for software loopholes.

References:

Baase, S. A Gift of Fire. Social, Legal and Ethical Issues for Computers and the Internet. San Diego State University, 2001

 http://thinkexist.com/quotations/ethics/