Acknowledging Cyber Crimes for Safe Surfing

Cybercrime is a widespread term that is used to represent a criminal exercise in which workstations or computer networks are a medium, a scapegoat, or a site of criminal activity and carry everything from electronic cracking to denial of service attacks. It also comprises the traditional violations in which computers or networks are used to enable unauthorised activity.

This involves crimes similar phishing, credit card scams, bank thievery, unauthorised downloading, industrial surveillance, child defamation, kidnapping children via chat rooms, scams, cyber terrorism, making and/or combination of viruses, Spam and so on.

Cyber Crimes can be characterised in two directions:

1. The crimes in which the computer is the spot. Examples of before-mentioned crimes are hacking, virus attacks, DOS attack etc.

2. The offence in which the computer is applied as a threat. These kinds of crimes encompass cyber terrorism, IPR violations, credit card frauds, EFT frauds, etc.

Different kinds of cyber crimes to be conscious of are:

Unauthorized Access and Hacking: Unauthorized access means any sort of introduction outwardly the permission of either of the legitimate or person in charge of the computer, computer system or computer network. Hacking means an illegal interference into a computer system and/or network. Every act performed to crushing into a computer and/or network is hacking. Hackers communicate or use ready-made computer programs to combat the target computer. Government websites are usually targeted sites for hackers.

Cyber Stalking: Cyber Stalking intends revolved acts of harassment or unsafe behaviour of the cybercriminal towards the victim by handling internet settings. Both kind of Stalkers i.e., Online & Offline – have a preference to command the victims' life.

Virus attacks: Viruses are the programs that have the capacity to spoil other programs and make duplicates of itself and disperse into a different program. Programs that propagate like viruses but spread from computer to computer are called worms. These are malicious software that associates themselves to another software.

Phishing: Phishing is the act of broadcasting an e-mail to a user dishonestly pretending to be a verified legitimate enterprise in an endeavour to scam the user into abandoning private data that will be practised for individuality theft. The e-mail addresses the user to visit a web site where they are proposed to update personal knowledge, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers that the legitimate institution already has.

Cyber Terrorism: Targeted interventions on military establishments, power plants, air traffic control, banks, trail traffic control, telecommunication networks are the common convincing targets.

By Kanika Vij