Computer Crime

1
Computer Crime FIRE, Chapter 7
2
Background

• Why worry?
• Crimes committed using the computer or Internet
  can be more costly (monetarily)than other crimes
  (e.g., a bank robber may get 2,500 to 5,000 on
  average average loss from computer fraud is
  100,000)
• Crimes are larger and affect more people (a
  hacker breaking into an e-commerce database can
  steal hundreds or thousands of credit card
  numbers)
• Crimes are harder to detect and trace (e.g., the
  anonymity of the Web)
• Computing provides new challenges for prevention,
  detection, and prosecution challenges that
  professionals will be asked to meet.

3
Hacking

• 1960-1970
• Originally, a hacker was a creative programmer
  who wrote elegant or creative code.
• Sometimes these folks would break into the
  computer systems at their schools to experiment
  and have fun remember that until the PC and the
  Internet, computing resources were quite
  restricted.
• 1970-1995
• The meaning of hacker began to change. There were
  incidents of trophy hacking (doing it just to
  show you could do it).
• There were also crimes, such as thefts of
  information and phone hacking
• The case of Kevin Mitnick a notorious hacker who
  was arrested in 1988 and finally tracked down and
  arrested again in 1995. He caused several million
  dollars of damage.

4
Hacking

• After 1995--the Web era
• Current hacking includes all previous pranks and
  crimes, but now we have the intricate
  interconnectnedness of the Web.
• Every networked computer is potentially
  vulnerable. This includes basic infrastructure
  (water, power, banks, hospitals, transportation,
  government agencies, telephone companies, etc.).
• Now we have viruses transmitted via email that
  spread in a similar fashion to real diseases (but
  much faster) there often have to be quarantine
  procedures.
• -The Love Bug from 2000 cost an estimated 10
  billion in damage.
• -Defacto standard systems (e.g., Microsoft
  Windows and Outlook) are especially vulnerable
  other systems (e.g., Mac OS) are less so but all
  are vulnerable.

5
Computer Viruses

• More than 81,000 virus-type threats exist today.
• This is even more complicated because there are
  lots of virus hoaxes, which may be in the form of
  dire email warnings about disk-eating (or
  computer destroying!) attachments that may land
  in your inbox.
• See www.sophos.com/virusinfo/ or
  www.ciac.org/ciac/ciac_virus_info.html

6
Types of Viruses

• Malicious worms (e.g., the Love Bug) that
  propogate via email and destroy the contents of
  computers.
• Denial-of-service attacks more recently there
  are distributed DNS attacks.
• Back-door worms that exploit vulnerabilities to
  enter surrepticiously and copy private
  information.

7
Internet Hoaxes

• Check http//hoaxbusters.ciac.org/