Tugasan OUM Sem 3

1. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
CYBER CRIMES IN MALAYSIA AND U.S.A
WHAT SHOULD WE DO IN MALAYSIA?
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Cyber crime is entering the main stream of discussion among authorities especially those who
involve in law. The vast development in technology obviously has given advantages and
disadvantages to the public generally. This assignment will venture further to the definition and
scope of cyber crime, classification of cyber crime, the comparison of cyber crime between
Malaysia and USA and the suggestions on how to curb the problem.
1.1 Definition and scope
Cyber crime has gained increased attention because computers have become so central at several
areas of social activities connected to everyday life, including, but not limited to, personal and
institutional finances, various recordkeeping functions, interpersonal communications, and
others. Because of its widespread accessibility, the advent of the internet has further served to
facilitate predatory personal crimes and property offenses committed with a computer. The U.S.
Bureau of Census reports that in 2000, there were 94 million people in the United States who
made use of the internet (Newburger, 2001). This greatly expands both the potential victim and
offender pools for both personal and property crimes.
Moreover, the nature of this forum has allowed some potential offenders to move more easily
toward actual criminal behavior because the victims can be depersonalized in the initial stages of
an offense. With the internet, an offender does not have to come face to face with a potential
target, which may make it easier for the offender to complete the victimization of the target. But
what exactly is “cyber-crime”, and is it distinct from other, more traditional forms of crime? To
begin answering these questions, it would be helpful to briefly look at the components of crime
in general. Traditionally, crime has been defined as an intentional violation of the legal code that
is punishable by the state. Central to this definition is the premise that crime occurs within the
boundaries of some physical reference point, that is, a location that constitutes a specific
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2. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
jurisdiction. For example, when a conventional case of fraud occurs, one of the important
considerations is where the actual offense took place so that questions of the appropriate
jurisdiction for prosecution can be addressed. Officials need to know where the victim and
offender came into contact with one another in the perpetration of the offense so that
investigative and prosecutorial authority can be determined.
However, this component is confounded when cyber crime is committed because the location is
no longer a static concept. With the advent of cyberspace, jurisdiction has become much more
problematic, transcending local, state, and even national boundaries. One needs only look at the
various e-mail scams that emanate from such locales as Nigeria, the United Kingdom, or China
to begin to understand how crime is being redefined in the cyber age. An equally confounding
issue has to do with the scope of cyber crime. There is a vast range of illegal behavior that could
be identified as cyber crime. Consequently, there seems to be a degree of ambiguity about what
is beingdiscussed when the subject of cybercrime is broached. Fraud, technology theft, security
breaches, identity theft, child pornography, and even stalking all potentially fall within the realm
of cyber criminality. Even within the computer community, there seems to be some disagreement
about which kinds of behavior should be classified as criminal.
There are some who would argue that certain forms of hacking, where a secure computer system
is breached and perhaps altered, should never be thought of as a criminal act. Advocates for this
position would maintain that the motivation for these actions is often not malicious and may
even prove to be beneficial in terms of identifying security shortcomings. Instead, this group
would rather see a focus on only those cases where sabotage or financial gain is involved (Schell,
Dodge and Moutsatos, 2002). Others, including those in law enforcement communities, would
strongly disagree with this position, pointing out that the so called harmless events of hacking
collectively cost billions of dollars of damage.Some definitions of cyber-crime are relatively
narrow in focus. In some cases, only hacking behavior would fall under the definition of what
constituted cyber-criminality. For example, the Council of Europe’s Cybercrime Treaty makes
reference to only those offenses that involve damage to data or to copyright and content
infringements. However, most experts would agree that this definition is much too narrow and
needs to take into account more traditional crimes, such as fraud and stalking, which make use of
computers (Gordon and Ford, 2006; Zeviar-Geese, 1997-1998).
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3. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
The legal definition of cybercrime used in the United States takes a relatively broad view of the
kinds of behavior constituting computer crime. The United States Code proscribes a range of
conduct related to the use of computers in criminal behavior, including conduct relating to the
obtaining and communicating of restricted information, the unauthorized accessing of
information from financial institutions, the United States government, and “protected
computers”; the unauthorized accessing of a government computer, fraud, the damaging of a
protected computer resulting in certain types of specified harm, trafficking in passwords and
extortionate threats to cause damage to a “protected computer” (United States Code, Section
1030 of title 18). Taking into account the statutory provisions of the United States Code, the
FederalBureau of Investigation identifies a number of computer-related crimes that are part of
their cyber mission,including serious computer intrusions and the spread of malicious code,
online sexual predation of minors and child pornography, the theft of U.S. intellectual property,
breaches of national security and organized criminal activity engaging in Internet fraud (Federal
Bureau of Investigation, 2006). Despite the specific identification of offenses, the legal
definitionof cyber crime tends to read like a grocery list and fails to anticipate future criminal
variations in cyber offending.
2.0 CONTENT
2.1 Classifications of Cyber Crimes
Cyber crime can be classified into four major categories as cyber crime against individual, cyber
crime against property, cyber crime against organization and cyber crime against society.
2.1.1 Cyber Crime Against Individual
Email spoofing,spamming,cyber defamation, harassment and cyber stalking are examples of
cyber crimes against individual. Email spoofing is a spoofed email is one in which e-mail header
is forged so that mail appears to originate from one source but actually has been sent from
another source. Then, the crime of spamming means sending multiple copies of unsolicited mails
or mass e-mails such as chain letters. While cyber defamation occurs when defamation takes
place with the help of computers or the internet. For example when someone publishes
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4. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
defamatory matter about someone on a website or sends e-mails containing defamatory
information. While cyber stalking means following the moves of an individual's activity over
internet. It can be done with the help of many protocols available such at e- mail, chat rooms or
user net groups.
2.1.2 Cyber Crime Against Property
Examples of cyber crime against property are credit card fraud and intellectual property crimes.
These include software piracy, illegal copying of program and distribution of copies of software,
copyright infringement, trademarks violations and theft of computer source code. In addition,
internet time theft. It is the usage of the internet hours by an unauthorized person which is
actually paid by another person.
2.1.3 Cyber Crime Against Organization
An unauthorized accessing of computer which is accessing the computer or network without
permission from the owner is one of the instances of this type of cyber crime. It can be of two
forms. The first one is changing or deleting data. While the second form is computer voyeur. It is
when the criminal reads or copies confidential or proprietary information, but the data is neither
deleted nor changed. The other example of crime against organization is 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. Virus attack is also one of the examples of crime against
organization. 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 them to. Furthermore, the email bombing in order sending large numbers of mails
to the individual or company or mail servers thereby ultimately are resulting into crashing also
crime against organization.
2.1.4 Cyber Crime Against Society
This type of cyber crime includes forgery, cyber terrorism and web jacking. Forgery is
something like currency notes, revenue stamps or mark sheets which can be forged using
computers and high quality scanners and printers. While cyber terrorism is the use of computer
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5. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
resources to intimidate or coerce others. In the case of 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.
2.2 COMPARISON OF CYBER CRIMES IN MALAYSIA AND USA
Cybercrime is increasing at an alarming rate worldwide with more than a million people
becoming victims every single day. The victims of cyber crime also paid dearly with a total loss
of US$388bil (RM1.21bil) to cyber criminals in 2010according to the Norton Cyber crime
Report 2011. Globally, in 2008, most scammers operated from the United States. The United
States still held a huge lead in active internet users then, a gap that has since closed considerably.
According to statistic, in 2008, China and United States each has approximately 200 million
internet users, and most of the world has grown commensurately. As the user population have
grown abroad, so havetheir scammer populations also increase day by day. Several countries
stand out in 2008 as have disproportionately huge populations of scammers are Nigeria,
Romania, the Netherlands and China. Lottery and fake money transfer (AFF)frauds seem to be
the specialty of the Nigerians. The United States still leads in identity theft and phishing or
spoofing fraudbased on The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in collaboration with the
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).
Cyber crimes do not only cost victims financially but emotionally too. However, victims could
have saved themselves of money and regret as the type of cyber crimes which they have been a
victim to be preventable. In Malaysia, the report found that the most common type of
cybercrimes is malware, scams and threats targeted at mobile devices. However many people
tend to underestimate the dangers of online crime thinking that it will happen to everyone else
but themselves. The survey found that seven out of 10 adults thought they would more likely be
a victim of physical crime rather than an online crime. Although Malaysia was not in the list of
countries studied in the report, national cyberspace police Cybersecurity Malaysia said the
findings are representative of the Malaysian threat landscape. It is the same environment, so
whatever that is happening in the world will definitely affect us the same way.
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6. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
Cyber crime causes damage to global economics in billions dollars and many experts think that it
is a promptly increasing threat for national security and social well being.In Malaysia, the
specific law that governs the misuse of computer is the Computer Crimes Act. Given the
increase in computer related crimes and computer abuse, the enactment of the Computer Crimes
Act was timely to govern and regulate this ‘cyberspace’ activity and impose sanctions for
criminal acts related to it.
FIGURE 1.0 Top Ten Countries by Count (Perpetrators)
These locations are among the most populous in the country.
1. United States 66.1%
2. United Kingdom 10.5%
3. Nigeria 7.5%
4. Canada 3.1%
5. China 1.6%
6. South Africa 0.7%
7. Ghana 0.6%
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7. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
8. Spain 0.6%
9. Italy 0.5%
10. Romania 0.5%
2.3 SUGGESTIONS ON HOW TO CURB CYBER CRIMES
Cyber crime refers to illegal activities that take place online, including fraud, spam, identity
theft, computer viruses and worms, cyber stalking, drug trafficking, sexual predators, malware or
spyware andphishing. There are a lot of ways on how to curb cyber crime. Firstly, we can avoid
it by education. As we know, the hackers are not the only ones who can gain power from
information. By educating ourselves about the types of scams that exist on the internet and how
to avert them, we are putting our self one step ahead of the cybercriminals. Since phishing is
prevalent, read up on the latest phishing scams and learn how to recognize a phishing attempt.
We need to remember that, phishing is when hackers attempt to lure us into revealing personal
new stories, so keep informed on the latest news related scams.
Secondly, we can use a firewall. Firewalls monitor traffic between our computer or network and
the internet and serve as a great first line of defense when it comes to keeping intruders out.
Make sure to use the firewall that comes with our security software. And if we have a home
wireless network, enable the firewall that comes with our router. We need to be careful not to
click on any links in messages from people we do not know. The link could take us to a fake
website that asks for our private information, such as user names and passwords, or it could
download malware onto our computer. Even if the message is from someone we know, be
cautious. Some viruses replicate and spread through email, so look for information that indicates
that the message is legitimate.
Then, we also should practice safe surfing. When navigating the web, we need to take
precautions to avoid phony websites that ask for our personal information and pages that contain
malware. Use a search engine to help us navigate to the correct web address since it will correct
misspellings. That way, we would notwind up on a fake page at a commonly misspelled address.
We may also want to use a product like McAfee software to help our computer navigate. The site
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8. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
advisor software is a free browser tool that tells us if a site is safe or not right in our search
results, so we are warned before we click. Then, in order to practice safe shopping, we also need
to be careful where we shop online. Be cautious when shopping at a site that we have never
visited before and do a little investigation before we enter into payment information. Most
people become victims of these at one time or another, but there are ways to avoid or deal with
cyber crime by protecting yourself appropriately.
Besides that, we must use comprehensive security software and keep our system updated. It
is because the hackers have a wide variety of ways to access the system and information. So, we
need comprehensive security software that can protect us from all angles. Just make sure that we
keep our security software up to date by selecting the automatic update function on your security
control panel and do not forget to perform regular scans. The other way to prevent cyber crime is
secure our wireless network it is because hackers can access data while it is in transit on an
unsecured wireless network. We can keep the hackers out by enabling the firewall on our router
and changing the router’s administrator password. The cybercriminals often know the default
passwords and they can use them to hack into our network. Then, we may also want to set up our
router so, it only allows access to people with passwords that are encrypted. We must check our
owner’s manual for instructions on setting up encryption.
In order to protect our system from being the victim of cyber crime, we must use strong
passwords. Although it may be easier for us to remember short passwords that reference our
birthday, middle name, or pet’s name, these kinds of passwords also make it easy for hackers.
Strong passwords can go a long way in helping secure our information, so choose a password
that is at least ten characters long and consists of a combination of letters, numbers and special
characters. Also consider changing the password periodically to reduce the likelihood of it being
compromised.
Last but not least, use common sense is also a proper way to curb cyber crime. Despite the
warnings, cybercrime is increasing, fueled by common mistakes people make such as responding
to spam and downloading attachments from people they do not know. So, use common sense
whenever we are on the internet. Never post personal information online or share sensitive
information such as our social security number and credit card number. Exercise caution when
clicking on any links or downloading any programs. Althoughwe do take some effort, remember
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9. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
that there are a lot of resources and tools to help us. And by adopting a few precautions and best
practices, we can help keep cyber crime from growing.
3.0 CONCLUSION
Cyber crime means any criminal activity in which a computer or network is the source, tool or
target or place of crime. Cyber crime comes in many forms, but most of these crimes deal with
stolen information. The most common types of cyber crime include identity theft, phishing
scams and fraud. It is crimes committed with the use of computers or relating to computers,
especially through internet. Crimes involving use of information or usage of electronic means in
furtherance of crime are covered under the scope of cyber crime committed against person. It can
be classified into four major categories as cyber crime against individual, cyber crime against
property, cyber crime against organization and cyber crime against society, property and
government.
Therefore we need to take a serious action and a drastic ways in order to curb cyber crime from
becoming more serious like in United States. The United States still leads in identity theft and
phishing. We need to make sure that the antivirus, anti malware, and anti spyware programmers t
are to be updated from the internet to keep up with newly introduced malicious computer
programmers. Then, make sure that our system having effective firewalls to keep out malicious
programmers from entering into a local or wide area networks. Besides that, the encryption
technologies must work well and use a strong password in order to protect our computer.
In conclusion, Malaysia, in its bid to be technologically advanced has put into place its various
national Information Communication and Technology (ICT) projects such as the Multimedia
Super Corridor and the various technology parks to promote the use and development of ICT.
Such promotion will result in a widespread use of the Internet and the Internet culture. It is
submitted that Malaysia must have up-to-date laws to effectively deal with the cybercrimes that
comes along with the Internet. To this end, Malaysia must constantly check and conduct
measurements to determine the use utility of its current laws to combat cybercrime. One cannot
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10. Assignment Of Cyber Crimes. OUMH1203.Faridah Husin. 751008035900001. Sem.3. 2011
deny that the online environment cannot and will never be rid of cybercrimes due to the
Internet’s unique architecture.
4.0 REFERENCES
The Future Challenges of Cyber Crime: Volume 5; Proceeding of the Future Working Group;
Toby Finnie, Tom Petee and John Jarvis, Quantico Virginia 2010.
Cybercrimes continue to rise. Retrieved November 7, 2011, from http://www.
Apecdoc.org/ site/Malaysia/ 2011 / 09 / 26 / cybercrime
Consumer Fraud Reporting Crime Statistics, Retrieved November 8, 2011, from
http://www. consumer fraud reporting. Org/ internet-scam-statistics. html.
Top 10 Steps to Protect Against Cybercrime. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from
http://www. dell. com/ 10 steps to protect against cybercrime_dell_en. pdf.
How to Prevent Cyber Crime. Retrieved November 7, 2011, from http://www. ehow.
com _4967690_ prevent cyber-crime-html.
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