Cybercrime – What is it?
In fact, what does the word Cyber really mean in the context of our everyday lives? In 1971 where PCs and servers did not exist in the way we use them today and Cyber was a word to describe scary-looking robots, then the first networked electronic email (in a form we would recognise today), was sent by Ray Tomlinson to other computers over the ARPANET (the pre-curser to modern networking), one generation later, over 40 trillion emails are sent every year…
Cybercrime flourished during the 1970s and has grown exponentially ever since – take a look at some of the headline events the word has been treated to since the Blue Box with headline events…
PAKISTANI BRAIN
1982 was a milestone year as Elk Cloner, an Apple II boot virus, was written by a 15-year-old high school student “as a joke” it was one of the first viruses to come to public attention when it attached itself to the Apple II operating system and spread “in the wild”. Pakistani Brain, the oldest virus created in 1986 under unauthorized circumstances, infected IBM computers and after multiple break-ins to government networks the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed into law in the USA, making computer tampering a crime punishable by jail time and fines
HONEY POTS
In 1986 Clifford Stoll was one of the first engineers to use a ‘honey pot’ to lure hackers back into his network, ultimately to track down an unauthorised user who was stealing and selling military information to the KGB.
CAPTAIN ZAP!
Ian Murphy, also known as “Captain Zap, became the first felon convicted of a computer crime. He broke into AT&T’s computers and changed the internal clock so that people received discounted rates during normal business hours.
LOVE BUG
In the year 2000, the Love Bug virus around the world and at its height hit over 10% of UK businesses – even the house of commons was cut off from eletronic communications. The virus, in the form of an attachement to an email, was programmed to delete some computer files, including MP3 music files and images, as well as raiding email addresses to multiply itself and send itself and other e-mails onwards. At the time it was the biggest computer virus the world had ever seen and the first global successful use of “social engineering” in delivering a payload onto PCs all over the world.
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
Since then, internet and communication development has exploded, creating a seismic shift in the way we do business. Today there are literally thousands of different ways to access information illegally on our networks, costing the world economy billions and destroying lives and business wholesale. For cybercriminals who may be individuals, organised crime groups, or even nation-states, it is highly lucrative and the barriers to entry are low. The ease of access to and relative anonymity provided by ICT lowers the risk of being caught while making crimes straightforward to conduct.
Where there is growth there is opportunity, not just for the entrepreneurial engineers who made all this possible, but for the equally entrepreneurial individuals ready to take advantage of our reliance on it, and here?s as an example of how enterprising those individuals can be?