Computer Literacy and Cybercrime

Computer Literacy and Cybercrime

  • Submitted By: bne818
  • Date Submitted: 02/23/2009 8:09 AM
  • Category: Technology
  • Words: 1608
  • Page: 7
  • Views: 1

Brandy Pollock Eason INF 103: Computer Literacy Sally Rogers February 9, 2009 Cybercrime For starters, what is computer crime? In general, there are two main categories of computer crime. First are crimes that target computer networks or even devices directly such as uploading malware, malicious codes, computing viruses, along with denial of service attacks. Second are crimes that use computer networks and devices as a gateway to cause harm such as cyber stalking, fraud, identity theft, phishing scams, and information warfare. These computer crimes have been labeled as “high-profile” crimes as the criminals have gotten more elaborate with hacking, child pornography, and copyright infringement. When a person steals information from sites or causes damage to computer networks, the damage can exist solely in digital form, however the consequence are very real. Computer fraud is one of the more popular terms when discussing cybercrime. Fraud, as pertaining to computers, is any dishonest distortion of facts intended to induce someone to do or not do something to cause a loss. In this context, fraud will result in obtaining a benefit by altering, destroying, suppressing, ore stealing output usually to conceal unauthorized transactions; this can be very difficult to detect. Harassment is another example or cybercrime that is less specific and difficult to trace. Harassment deals with direct obscenities and comments meant to be derogatory to specific individuals focusing on gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. One case was recently made public involving a 49 year old woman bullying a 13 year old girl through Myspace resulting in the young girl committing suicide. This case was treated as any other crime under new laws covering such acts and the woman was charged with a misdemeanor and harassment. Email predators take many victims each year as well. Email scams can come in many forms. In fact, the FBI’s 2006 IC3 report stated that 73.9% of Internet crime...

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