Types Of Cyber Crime

There are different types of cyber crime:

1. Cyber stalking: It is the act of stalking, harassing or threatening someone using the internet/computer as a medium. This is often done to defame a person and email, social networks, instant messengers, web-postings, etc. are used using the internet as a medium because of the anonymity it provides. This behaviour includes making false allegations, threats, sexually abusing minors, surveillance, etc.

2. Child pornography: It is the act of possessing an image or video of a minor (below 18 years) engaging in sexual conduct.

3. Forgery and counterfeiting: It is the use of computers for forgery and the forgery is a document. With advances in hardware and software, it has become possible to prepare a fake document that matches the original to such an extent that it is not possible to assess the authenticity of the document without expert judgment.

4. Software Piracy and IPR Related Crimes: Software piracy is the illegal reproduction and distribution for personal use or business. It comes under the crime related to IPR infringement. Some other crimes under IPR infringement are: downloading songs, downloading movies, etc.

5. Cyber Terrorism: It is defined as the use of computer resources to intimidate or coerce the government, the civilian population or any section thereof, in order to further political or social objectives.

6. Phishing: It is a process of obtaining personal and sensitive information of an individual through email by disguising as a trustworthy entity in electronic communication. The purpose of phishing is identity theft and personal information such as username, password and credit card number etc. can be used to steal money from the user account. If a telephone is used as a medium of identity theft, it is known as vishing (voice phishing). Another form of phishing is smishing, in which SMS is used to lure customers.

7. Computer Vandalism: It is the act of physically destroying computing resources using physical force or malicious code.

8. Computer Hacking: It is a practice of modifying computer hardware and software to accomplish a goal outside the manufacturer‟s original purpose. The purpose of hacking a computer system may vary from a mere demonstration of technical ability to sealing, modifying or destroying information for social, economic or political reasons. Now corporates are hiring hackers, a person who is engaged in computer hacking, to deliberately hack an organization’s computer in order to find and fix security vulnerabilities. Hackers can be classified as:

White Hat: White hat hackers are the individuals who hack the system to find out the security vulnerabilities of the system and inform the organizations so that preventive action can be taken to protect the system from external hackers. White hat hackers can be salaried employees of an organization, who are hired to find security flaws, or they can also be a freelancer, who wants to prove his role in this field. They are popularly known as ethical hackers.
Black Hat: Unlike white hat, black hat hacks systems with malicious intent. They may hack systems for socially, politically or economically motivated motives. They find security vulnerabilities in systems, keep the information to themselves and exploit the system for personal or organizational gain until the organization whose system has been compromised becomes aware of it and applies a security patch. These are popularly known as crackers.
Grey Hat: Grey hat hackers find security vulnerabilities and report them to site administrators and offer to fix security bugs for a consulting fee.
Blue Hat: A blue hat hacker is someone from outside computer security consulting firms who is used to bug-test a system before it is launched, looking for exploits so they can be shut down.

9. Creating and distributing viruses over the Internet: Spreading of viruses can cause business and financial losses to an organization. This loss includes the cost of repairing the system, cost associated with loss of business during downtime and cost of loss of opportunity. If the hacker is found then the organization can sue him for an amount greater than or equal to the loss suffered by the organization.

10. Spamming: Sending unsolicited and commercial bulk messages over the Internet is known as spamming. An email can be classified as spam if it meets the following criteria: a. Mass mailing:- The email is not targeted to a particular person but to a large number of people. b. Anonymity:- The real identity of the person is unknown. c. Spam:- The email is neither expected nor requested by the recipient. These spams not only annoy the recipients and overload the network but also waste time and occupy valuable memory space of the mailbox.

11. Cross Site Scripting: It is an activity that involves injecting malicious client side scripts into a trusted website. As the browser executes the malicious script, the malicious script gains access to cookies and other sensitive information and is sent to a remote server. This information can now be used to gain financial benefits or to gain physical access to a system for personal interest.

12. Online Auction Fraud: There are many genuine websites that offer online auctions on the Internet. Taking advantage of the reputation of these websites, some cyber criminals lure customers into online auction fraud schemes, which often result in either overpayment of the product or the item never being delivered once the payment is made.

13. Cyber Squatting: It is the act of reserving the domain name of ‟someone else‟s trademark with the intention of later selling it to the organization that owns the trademark, and that too at a higher price.

14. Logic Bombs: These are malicious codes inserted into legitimate software. The malicious action is triggered by a specific condition. If the conditions remain true in the future, the malicious action is triggered and based on the action defined in the malicious code, they either destroy the information stored in the system or make the system unusable.

15. Web Jacking: The hacker gains access to the website of an organization and either blocks it or modifies it to serve political, economic or social interest. In recent examples of web jacking some websites of educational institutions were hacked by Pakistani hackers and the homepage of these websites showed an animation that had Pakistani flags. Another example is that Indian hackers hacked the website of Pakistani railways on the occasion of India’s Independence Day in 2014 and put up the Indian flag on its homepage for several hours.

16. Internet Time Thefts: Internet Time Thefts Hacking the username and password of a person’s ISP and surfing the internet at his expense is Internet Time Theft.

17. Denial of Service Attack: It is a cyber attack in which the network is blocked and often collapsed by flooding it with useless traffic, thereby disrupting legitimate network traffic.

18. Salami Attack: It is an attack that progresses with small steps and final additions leading to a larger attack. The increments are so small that they go unnoticed. An example of a salami attack is gaining access to a person’s online banking and withdrawing such small amounts that the owner does not notice it. Often the banking website has a default trigger set and transactions below that such as a withdrawal of Rs. 1000 are not reported to the account owner. Withdrawing an amount of Rs. 1000 in a certain time period will result in withdrawing a large amount in total.

19. Data Diddling: It is a practice of altering data before it is entered into a computer system. Often, the original data is retained even after the data has been manipulated. For example, the DA or basic salary of a person is altered in a person’s payroll data for salary calculation. Once the salary is calculated and transferred to his account, the total salary in the report is replaced with his actual salary.

20. Email Spoofing: It is a process of altering the header information of an e-mail so that its original source cannot be identified and the recipient may find the email to have come from a source other than the original source.

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