Classification Of Cyber Crimes

Key Takeaways:

Cyber crimes are majorly of 4 types:

1. Against Individuals: These include e-mail spoofing, spamming, cyber defamation, cyber harassments and cyber stalking.

2. Against Property: These include credit card frauds, internet time theft and intellectual property crimes.

3. Against Organisations: These include unauthorized accessing of computer, denial Of service, computer contamination / virus attack, e-mail bombing, salami attack, logic bomb, trojan horse and data diddling.

4. Against Society: These include Forgery, CYber Terrorism, Web Jacking.

Classification Of Cyber Crimes

Cyber crimes can be classified in to 4 major categories as the following:

(1) Cyber crime against Individual      

(2) Cyber crime Against Property

(3) Cyber crime Against Organization 

(4) Cyber crime Against Society

(1) Against Individuals

(i) Email spoofing :
A spoofed email is one in which the e-mail header is forged so that the mail appears to originate from one source but actually has been sent from another source.

(ii) Spamming :
Spamming means sending multiple copies of unsolicited mails or mass e-mails such as chain letters.

(iii) Cyber Defamation :
This occurs when defamation takes place with the help of computers and/or the Internet. E.g. someone publishes defamatory matter about someone on a website or sends e-mails containing defamatory information.

(iv) Harassment & Cyber stalking :
Cyber Stalking Means following an individual's activity over internet. It can be done with the help of many protocols available such as e- mail, chat rooms, user net groups.

(2) Against Property

(i) Credit Card Fraud : As the name suggests, this is a fraud that happens by the use of a credit card. This generally happens if someone gets to know the card number or the card gets stolen.

(ii) Intellectual Property crimes : These include
Software piracy: Illegal copying of programs, distribution of copies of software.
Copyright infringement: Using copyrighted material without proper permission.
Trademarks violations: Using trademarks and associated rights without permission of the actual holder.
Theft of computer source code: Stealing, destroying or misusing the source code of a computer.

(iii) Internet time theft :
This happens by the usage of the Internet hours by an unauthorized person which is actually paid by another person.

(3) Against Organisations

(i) Unauthorized Accessing of Computer:
Accessing the computer/network without permission from the owner.
It can be of 2 forms:

a) Changing/deleting data:
Unauthorized changing of data.

b) Computer voyeur:
The criminal reads or copies confidential or proprietary information, but the data is neither deleted nor changed.

(ii) Denial Of Service :
When Internet server is flooded with continuous bogus requests so as to denying legitimate users to use the server or to crash the server.

(iii) Computer contamination / Virus attack :
A computer virus is a computer program that can infect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved) copy of it. Viruses can be file infecting or affecting boot sector of the computer. Worms, unlike viruses do not need the host to attach themselves to.

(iv) Email Bombing :
Sending large numbers of mails to the individual or company or mail servers thereby ultimately resulting into crashing.

(v) Salami Attack :
When negligible amounts are removed & accumulated in to something larger. These attacks are used for the commission of financial crimes.

(vi) Logic Bomb :
It is an event dependent program. As soon as the designated event occurs, it crashes the computer, release a virus or any other harmful possibilities.

(vii) Trojan Horse :
This is an unauthorized program which functions from inside what seems to be an authorized program, thereby concealing what it is actually doing.

(viii) Data diddling :
This kind of an attack involves altering raw data just before it is processed by a computer and then changing it back after the processing is completed.

(4) Against Society

(i) Forgery :

Currency notes, revenue stamps, mark sheets etc. can be forged using computers and high quality scanners and printers.

(ii) Cyber Terrorism :

Use of computer resources to intimidate or coerce people and carry out the activities of terrorism.

(iii) Web Jacking :

Hackers gain access and control over the website of another, even they change the content of website for fulfilling political objective or for money.