Computer Crime

What is Computer Crime

A computer crime is any illegal activity using computer software, data or access as the object, subject or instrument of the crime.

Common crimes include:

• Crimes related to money transfer on the internet
• Making long distance calls illegally using computers
• Stealing software
• Illegal access to confidential files
• Selling or misusing personal
• Hardware and software piracy
• Virus
• Cracking
• Theft of computer time

It must be observed that 80% of all computer crimes happen from within the company. Over 60% of all crimes go unreported.

Making and using duplicate hardware and software is called piracy.We tend to pirate because:

• We like free things
• Why pay for something when we can get it for free ?
• Our thinking and actions are self -serving
• If we have the opportunity to get away with something, benefit financially, and minimal risk is involved, the way in which we’ve been conditioned by our capitalist society do it.

A virus is a self-replacing program that can cause damage to data and files stored on your computer. These are programs written by programmers with great programming skills who are motivated by the need for challenge or to cause destruction. 57,000 known virus programs are in existence. 6 new viruses are found each day.

A commonly cited reference is the Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics written by the Computer Ethics Institute. This is given below.

Computer crimes require special laws to be formed by the government. Different countries have different ways of making the laws and awarding punishment to those who commit the crimes.

What is called as theft of ‘computer time‘?

In other words a lot of computer time is not used. Many solutions for using this spare time are being researched. However, this idle time of computer in an organization is being stolen illegally. Some other software runs on an idle computer without the knowledge of the organization. This is called theft of ‘computer time‘.

What is Cracking?

Cracking is the illegal access to the network or computer system. Illegal use of special resources in the system is the key reason for cracking. The resources may be hardware, software, files or system information. Revenge , business reasons and thrill are other common reasons for committing this crime.