4.3 Pakistan sets up cyber crime wing
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- A Pakistani security agency has launched a special wing to combat cyber crimes in part because the country had to rely on U.S. investigators to trace e-mails sent by the kidnappers of American journalist Daniel Pearl a year ago.
"The purpose of establishing the National Response Center for Cyber Crimes is to stop misuse of the Internet and trace those involved in cyber-related crimes," Iftikhar Ahmad, spokesman for Pakistan's Interior Ministry, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
"The importance of this special wing was felt when Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, and his captors started sending e-mails to newspapers," he said.
12 The Wall Street Journal correspondent disappeared on January 23, 2002 from Pakistan's southern
city of Karachi.
On January 27, 2002, the Journal and other media received an e-mail from a group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. The e-mail contained a photo of Pearl, 38, with a gun to his head.
The FBI traced the e-mails, and police captured those who allegedly sent them to the newspapers, but, on February 21, 2002, the U.S. Embassy received a videotape showing Pearl was dead.
"The National Response Center for Cyber Crimes will play a key role in the days to come in tracing those terrorists who often use the Internet or prepaid telephone cards to communicate messages to their associates for carrying out acts of terrorism and other purposes," Ahmad said.
The special wing has been established at the headquarters of an intelligence agency in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital.
Literature Survey
The short reviews to the literature we have gone through are given below:
Article no.1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercrime
An international legal definition is cybercrime that is used by most of the countries in Europe and North America as well as South Africa and Japan was agree in the Convention on Cybercrime that entered into force on 1 July 2004.
The move comes as Pakistan cracks down on terrorists.
12 Although the term cybercrime is usually restricted to describing criminal activity in
which the computer or network is an essential part of the crime, this term is also used to include traditional crimes in which computers or networks are used to enable the illicit activity.
Examples of cybercrime which the computer or network is a tool of the criminal activity include spamming and criminal copyright crimes, particularly those facilitated through peer-to-peer networks.
Examples of cybercrime in which the computer or network is a target of criminal activity include unauthorized access (i.e, defeating access controls), malicious code, and denial-of-service attacks.
Examples of cybercrime in which the computer or network is a place of criminal activity include theft of service (in particular, telecom fraud) and certain financial frauds.
Finally, examples of traditional crimes facilitated through the use of computers or networks include Nigerian 419 or other gullibility or social engineering frauds (e.g., hacking "phishing", identity theft, child pornography, online gambling, securities fraud, etc.). Cyberstalking is an example of a traditional crime -- harassment -- that has taken a new form when facilitated through computer networks.
Additionally, certain other information crimes, including trade secret theft and industrial or economic espionage, are sometimes considered cybercrimes when computers or networks are involved.
Cybercrime in the context of national security may involve hacktivism (online activity intended to influence policy), traditional espionage, or information warfare and related activities.
One of the recent researches showed that a new cybercrime is being registered every 10 seconds in Britain. During 2006 the computer crooks were able to strike 3.24 million times. Some crimes performed on-line even surpassed their equivalents in real world. In addition, experts believe that about 90% of cybercrimes stay unreported.
According to a study performed by Shirley McGuire, a specialist in psychology of the University of San Francisco, the majority of teenagers who hack and invade computer systems are doing it for fun rather than with the aim of causing harm.
Shirley McGuire mentioned that quite often parents cannot understand the motivation of the teenage hackers. She performed an anonymous experiment, questioning more than 4,800 students in the area of San Diego. Her results were presented at the American Psychological Association conference:
38% of teenagers were involved in software piracy;
12 18% of all youngsters confessed of entering and using the information stored on
other personal computer or website;
13% of all the participants mentioned they performed changes in computer systems or computer files.
The study revealed that only 1 out of 10 hackers were interested in causing certain harm or earn money. Most teenagers performed illegal computer actions of curiosity, to experience excitement. Many cyber police is getting more complaints about Orkut these days as many fake profiles being created and thus leads to crime.
Write up # 1
There is the new crime of cracking, invading, or snooping into other people or organizations’
computer systems. Opinions differed as to whether merely looking was a crime, especially since earlier hackers often detected security flaws and felt they were being upstanding public citizens in reporting them. Clearly entering a system with criminal intent is another matter.
Then there are situations where the crime is old but the system is new, such as Internet fraud scams. Marketing fraud has been around for millennia, telephone scams have been around for decades, and now we have Internet scams. The same is true for pornography and copyright fraud.
The third element is about investigation, where the computer serves as a repository of evidence, necessary for successful prosecution of whatever crime is being transacted. What used to be recorded in paper records is unlikely to be recorded except digitally now, and can be destroyed or encrypted remotely.
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Article # 2:
http://www.vecam.org/article658.html Cybercrime
Stephanie Perrin
The word cybercrime was coined in the late 90s, as the Internet spread across North America. A sub group of the G8 group of nations was formed following a meeting in Lyon, France, in order to study emerging problems of criminality that were being fostered by or migrating to the Internet. This “Lyon’s group” was using the term to describe, in a very loose way, all kinds of crime being perpetrated on the net or on new telecommunications networks which were rapidly falling in cost.
Simultaneously, and led by players in the Lyons group, the Council of Europe started drafting a Convention on Cybercrime [1]. This convention, which was first presented for public view in 2000, incorporated a new array of surveillance techniques which law enforcement agencies considered were necessary to fight “cybercrime”. How was cybercrime defined? The final version of this Convention, passed in November 2001 after the events of 911, does not define the term. It is used as a catch-all term for the problems which increased computing power, cheap communications, and the phenomenon of the Internet have raised for police and intelligence agencies. The convention describes the various provisions and subject areas where new law is required as follows:
Title 1 - Offences against the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer data and systems.
Title 2 - Computer-related offences [forgery and fraud].
Title 3 - Content-related offences [pornography].
Title 4 - Offences related to infringements of copyrigh and related rights.
Title 5 - Ancillary liability and sanctions [aiding and abetting, corporate liability].
Cybercrime : the Pandora’s box
The provisions respecting the crimes are actually quite brief; the bulk of the Convention is taken up with procedural law and international cooperation. Successful prosecution demanded new techniques for gathering evidence, ensuring its integrity, and sharing across borders. Expedited data preservation orders, electronic warrants, real time data capture, retention of traffic data all spelled intrusion to civil liberties. Increased reliance on mutual legal assistance treaties, even where there was no dual criminality, opened up a Pandora’s Box of potential criminal charges being laid from regimes around the world. While the Cybercrime Convention has now clearly enunciated the problems inherent in global criminal investigation, the methods of maintaining privacy and human rights have not been addressed.
12 In the beginning, there was great confusion. Cybercrime was applied to new types of criminality,
such as cyber porn, or the distribution of photographic images which violate certain (but not all) countries’ laws with respect to unacceptable pornography or exploitive material. Because the Internet knows no boundaries, it was becoming much easier for individuals to distribute material across borders, sometimes without leaving traces as to the originator. Breaking into computer systems, or “hacking” was also a new crime, and one that many countries had not yet made a criminal offense. One of the purposes of the Cybercrime Treaty was to establish and agree the provisions that ought to be in the legislation of signatories, in order to fight new criminal activity in a well coordinated way. Online gambling was another issue; virtual racetracks were popping up on the Internet, and although countries varied enormously in their approach to gambling, enough developed countries were counting on gambling revenue in government budgets or tourism economies, that the emergence of virtual competitors operating from tax havens was a real concern.
Data retention, cryptography: two main security issues at stake
Prior to the cybercrime treaty’s emergence to public view, civil libertarians around the world had been busy fighting various domestic moves to introduce mandatory data retention, or the storage of telecommunications and Internet traffic logs, for the purposes of investigating crime. Data retention was seen as part of a package of controls, which the FBI had first advanced in about 1992 as being necessary to fight crime on the new “information highway” as we called it back in the early days of the Internet.
Write up # 2:
So what is cybercrime? First, what is cyberspace? The term was coined by science fiction writer and applied to the Internet by Howard Rheingold, so it took off as a label for this new communications infrastructure.
But sometimes we forget that it does not really exist. What exists is a network, and a lot of servers and equipment. Communications over the Internet appear to be ephemeral and evaporate, and in the minds of the public that is the gestalt that operates. Perhaps this is because of the frailty of the average individual’s own relationship with their computers and email programs.
Who has not lost a document when they forgot to save it, or had their calendar and email disappear? In fact, a good investigator with forensic tools can find and resurrect just about everything, because unlike the analog world, the digital world leaves transactional information behind for every bit and byte that is sent. These tools and skills are not available to the average consumer, so the concept of cyberspace, a kind of magical hyperspace from which data comes and goes, seems to fit.
When the first efforts to draft the Cybercrime Treaty started, most law enforcement agencies were also behind the technological curve. They did not know how to investigate, how to seize evidence on computers without contaminating it, how to preserve data in case the owner had sent out a kill program to destroy it, how to track down the originators of a message, particularly when encrypted or using anonymizers. These are non-trivial problems, and part of the early work of law enforcement agencies was an effort to slow down the train and draw attention to their own
12 needs for resources to attack a new problem. Since it is usually easier to get new resources to
fight a new problem rather than the escalation of the old one, it is not surprising that new terms were coined. However, it is not clear that “Cybercrime” is a useful term, and it may be totally misleading. Crime takes place in the real world, usually involving real people and real money.
Focusing on that aspect of the problem, rather than on the more ephemeral aspects of how the communications are sent, is important.
Article # 3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28computer_security%29
In a security context, a hacker is someone involved in computer security/insecurity, specializing in the discovery of exploits in systems (for exploitation or prevention), or in obtaining or preventing unauthorized access to systems through skills, tactics and detailed knowledge. In the most common general form of this usage, "hacker" refers to a black-hat hacker (a malicious or criminal hacker). There are also ethical hackers (more commonly referred to as white hats), and those more ethically ambiguous (grey hats). To disambiguate the term hacker, often cracker is used instead, referring either to computer security hacker culture as a whole to demarcate it from the academic hacker culture (such as by Eric S. Raymond[1]) or specifically to make a distinction within the computer security context between black-hat hackers and the more ethically positive hackers (commonly known as the white-hat hackers). The context of computer security hacking forms a subculture which is often referred to as the network hacker subculture or simply the computer underground. According to its adherents, cultural values center around the idea of creative and extraordinary computer usage. Proponents claim to be motivated by artistic and political ends, but are often unconcerned about the use of criminal means to achieve them.
Artifacts and customs
Contrary to the academic hacker subculture, networking hackers have no inherently close connection to the academic world. They have a tendency to work anonymously and in private. It is common among them to use aliases for the purpose of concealing identity, rather than revealing their real names. This practice is uncommon within and even frowned upon by the academic hacker subculture. Members of the network hacking scene are often being stereotypically described as crackers by the academic hacker subculture, yet see themselves as hackers and even try to include academic hackers in what they see as one wider hacker culture, a view harshly rejected by the academic hacker subculture itself.
Instead of a hacker – cracker dichotomy, they give more emphasis to a spectrum of different categories, such as white hat (“ethical hacking”), grey hat, black hat and script kiddie. In contrast to the academic hackers, they usually reserve the term cracker to refer to black hat hackers, or more generally hackers with unlawful intentions.
12 The network hacking subculture is supported by regular gatherings, so called Hacker cons.
These have drawn more and more people every year including SummerCon (Summer), DEF CON, HoHoCon (Christmas), PumpCon (Halloween), H.O.P.E. (Hackers on Planet Earth) and HEU (Hacking at the End of the Universe). They have helped expand the definition and solidify the importance of the network hacker subculture. In Germany, members of the subculture are organized mainly around the Chaos Computer Club.
The subculture has given birth to what its many members consider to be novel forms of art, most notably ascii art. It has also produced its own slang and various forms of unusual alphabet use, for example leetspeak. Both things are usually seen as an especially silly aspect by the academic hacker subculture. In part due to this, the slangs of the two subcultures differ substantially. Political attitude usually includes views for freedom of information, freedom of speech, a right for anonymity and most have a strong opposition against copyright. Writing programs and performing other activities to support these views is referred to as hacktivism by the subculture. Some go as far as seeing illegal cracking ethically justified for this goal; the most common form is website defacement.
Write up # 3
The term "Hacker" may mean simply a person with mastery of computers; however the mass media most often uses "Hacker" as synonymous with a (usually criminal) computer intruder. See hacker, and Hacker definition controversy. In computer security, several subgroups with different attitudes and aims use different terms to demarcate themselves from each other, or try to exclude some specific group with which they do not agree.
A white hat hacker or ethical hacker is someone who breaks security but who does so for altruistic or at least non-malicious reasons. White hats generally have a clearly defined code of ethics, and will often attempt to work with a manufacturer or owner to improve discovered security weaknesses, although many reserve the implicit or explicit threat of public disclosure after a "reasonable" time as a prod to ensure timely response from a corporate entity. The term is also used to describe hackers who work to deliberately design and code more secure systems. To white hats, the darker the hat, the more the ethics of the activity can be considered dubious. Conversely, black hats may claim the lighter the hat, the more the ethics of the activity are lost.
We can also define a hacker as
• A person who enjoys learning details of a programming language or system
• A person who enjoys actually doing the programming rather than just theorizing about it
• A person capable of appreciating someone else's hacking
• A person who picks up programming quickly
12
• A person who is an expert at a particular programming language or system, as in "Unix hacker"
Article # 4:
http://www.anl.com/pages/feature.htm
The Effects of Cybercrime
When you purchase a home it comes with a door and a lock. You always will make sure that the door/lock exist and that the lock is working properly. If you want you can aim to further secure your home against any threats. You may purchase a new security system, an additional lock or maybe even a pet dog for added safety. Why would you not secure your investment? Would you invite criminals to use your home to commit additional crimes wherever he/she pleases?
When it comes to your PC or Network, you need to ask yourself the following questions.
• Would you like to have yourself, organization, corporation or business responsible for cyber-crime, without you knowing?
• Would you like to be prosecuted for something you did not do?
• Would you like to be sued for privacy violations?
• Would you like to be the base of operations for major crime?
• Would you like to become another survey statistics?
• Would you like to loose clients due to lack of public confidence in your Information Technology system?
• Would you like to be the VICTIM?
So how are criminals committing the crimes?
Tools of the Trade
• Wireless networking technology poses the biggest problem, as an unsecured network can be hacked from someone outside using a simple radio antenna, PDA or cell phone.
• Password Crackers (Software designed to decrypt passwords, so they can gain access)
• Network Scanning software that looks for open ports to gain access to a network (software or hardware based)
• Illegitimate Websites (fake URLs), to lure you into giving information over the web or even hack an un-patched (updated) system
• SPAM (used to get email lists to possibly cause more damage) What are general reasons, for hacking, by cyber-criminals?
• Gathering Trophies (quest to become famous)
• General Mischief
• Financial Gain
• Revenge
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Recently, Microsoft went as far as to post a $250,000 bounty for the writers of the MSBlast worm and the SoBig.F virus. Organizations such as Interpol now have sections of their website devoted to cyber-crime, with other websites such as the IFCC “Internet Fraud Complaint Center” specializing in Internet Crime.
In General, computer viruses can be transferred to an unsuspecting PC through a variety of formats.
In General, computer viruses can be transferred to an unsuspecting PC through a variety of formats.