Computer Crimes

Related Terms: Internet Security

DEFINITIONS

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in its manual on computer crime, defines such crime as "any violations of criminal law that involve a knowledge of computer technology for their perpetration, investigation, or prosecution." Being very broad, the definition, dating to 1989, remains valid. In its elaborations on the subject, DOJ divides computer crime into three categories: 1) crimes in which computer hardware, peripherals, and software are the target of a crime; the criminal is obtaining these objects illegally; 2) crimes in which the computer is the immediate "subject" or "victim" of a crime, i.e., the crime consists of attacks on a computer or a system, destruction or disrupting of which is the damage caused; and 3) crimes in which computers and related systems are the means or "instrument" by which ordinary crimes are committed, such as theft of identities, data, or money or the distribution of child pornography.

Computer Crime: Broad Focus

The first category is part of computer crime no doubt because computers are still surrounded by a halo of novelty. In the course of time, the theft of computers or software will no more be remarked upon than the theft of groceries or horses (e.g., "grocery crime" or "horse crime.") In the third category the computer is the principal means of obtaining other things and is thus analogous to "armed" robbery—where a weapon is the means of achieving the criminal end. The rapid spread of computers and computer systems, interconnected by wired or wireless means, has opened a new field in which criminals could operate. But all the crimes covered by the third category existed before computers.

Computer Crime: Narrow Focus

The second of DOJ's categories is the one most people associate with computer crime and also with "computer annoyance" in the form of "spam." These disruptions began innocently enough. The first virus, known as Elk Clone, was written by Rich Skrenta as a boy in the 9th grade around 1982. The virus resided on an Apple II disk and, on the 50th booting of the computer with that disk, displayed a little poem, entitled "Elk Cloner: the program with a personality," which said in part: It will get on all your disks / It will infiltrate your chips / Yes it's Cloner! Rich Skrenta has, since, gone on to become the co-founder and CEO of Topix.net, an Internet news service. Viruses have differentiated into other categories. Major forms and definitions are listed below as outlined by Ryan P. Wallace and associates writing in American Criminal Law Review:

• Viruses. These are programs that modify other computer programs so that they carry out functions intended by the creator of the virus. The Melissa Virus, for example (March 1999), disrupted e-mail service around the world.
• Worms. Worms have the functionality of viruses but spread by human action by way of the Internet hitch-hiking on mail.
• Trojan horses. As their name implies, these intruders pretend to be innocent programs. Users are persuaded to install something innocent-seeming on their computer. The Trojan horse then activates a more destructive program embedded in the innocent code.
• Logic bombs. Are destructive programs activated by some event or a specific date or time. Elk Cloner fit this category because it activated its message on the 50th booting of a disk. The same concept is used legally by companies that distribute time-limited samples of their software. The software disables itself after the passage, say, of 30 or 60 days.
• Sniffers. These are legitimate programs used to monitor and analyze networks. They can be deployed in a criminal fashion to steal passwords, credit card information, identities, or to spy on network activity.
• Distributed denial of service attacks. Such attacks are directed at Web sites by illegitimately causing multiple computers to send barrages of connection requests to the target site, thus causing it to crash.

The "Hacker"

The term "hacker" came to be applied to computer hobbyists who spent their spare time creating video games and other basic computer programs. The term acquired negative connotations in the 1980s when computer experts illegally accessed several high-profile databanks. Databases at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (a center of nuclear weapons research) and the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City were among their targets. Access to systems by telephone linkage from any computer increased such attacks. Over time, the "hacker" label came to be applied to programmers and disseminators of viruses. The public perception of hackers continues to be that of a lone expert with a taste for mischief. But "hacking" has come to encompass a wide range of computer crimes motivated by financial gain. Indeed, the vital information kept in computers has made them a target for corporate espionage, fraud, and embezzlement efforts. With the growing sophistication in computer security programs and law-enforcement efforts has come the insight that many apparent "hacker" attacks come from well-informed insiders intent on spoil or, occasionally, on vengeance.

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