Cybercrime

Cyber crime is any criminal activity which uses network access to commit a criminal act. With the exponential growth of Internet connection, the opportunities for the exploitation of any weaknesses in Information Security are multiplying.

Cyber crime may be internal or external, with the former easier to perpetrate.

The term has evolved over the past few years since the adoption of Internet connection on a global scale with hundreds of millions of users. Cybercrime refers to the act of performing a criminal act using cyberspace (the Internet network), as the communications vehicle. Some would argue that a Cybercrime is not a crime as it is a crime against software and not against a person's person or property. However, whilst the legal systems around the world scramble to introduce laws to combat Cybercriminals, two types of attack are prevalent :-

• Techno-crime. A pre-meditated act against a system or systems, with the express intent to copy, steal, prevent access, corrupt or otherwise deface or damage parts or all of a computer system. The 24x7 connection to the Internet makes this type of Cybercrime a real possibility to engineer from anywhere in the world; leaving few if any, 'finger prints'.
• Techno-vandalism. These acts of 'brainless' defacement of Websites, and/or other activities such as copying files and publicising their contents publicly, are usually opportunistic in nature. Tight internal security, allied to strong technical safeguards should prevent the vast majority of such incidents.