Personal Blog & Electronic Commerce

Cybercrime is a criminal activity in which the computer or network is an essential part of the crime.

Why can’t cybercrimes or cybercriminals be stopped?

There are many reason why cybercrimes or cybercriminals can’t be stopped and I will only focus on the most important reason is that online shoppers did not take necessary precautions to avoid themselves from being a victim. Fraud protection that is provided by credit card issuers is heavily relied by some shoppers who ignore the risk of indentity theft. Some people respond to phishing, making it profitable that makes phishing rampant. Users exposed too much of themselves online by using debit card on online gambling sites or even revealing themselves in online communities ( Friendster, My Space, Facebook and etc.) while phising gets most of the media attention. Identity theft or user’s PCs are infected with malware converting them into zombies computers (zombies) which are used for launching attacks or sending e-mail spam happens when the spammers,hackers or other criminals use the personal information that are posted in these sites. Majority of the spam is relayed by zombies because by using the PCs of others, it helps the spammers to avoid detection and save bandwidth cost.

Discuss the possible threats to identity theft.

(a) Financial identity theft

Identity theft is a catch-all term for crimes involving illegal usage of another individual’s identity. The consequence of having one’s identity stolen is that the victim whose identity was stolen will have a higher chance of being burdened with heavy debts. For instance, someone whose indentity was stolen might received a letter from bank or even worst warning from loan sharks stating that they have borrow a large amount of loan from them and wants him/her to repay the loan.

(b) Identity cloning and concealment

In this situation, a criminal acquires personal identifiers, and then impersonates someone for concealment from authorities. This may be done by a person who wants to avoid arrest for crimes, by a person who is working illegally in a foreign country, or by a person who is hiding from creditors or other individuals. Unlike credit-dependent financial crimes, these crimes can be non self-revealing, continuing for an indeterminate amount of time without being detected.

(c) Criminal identity theft

A criminal identifies himself to police as another individual when they are caught commiting an offence or illegal activities. In some cases, the criminal will obtain a state issued ID using stolen documents or personal information belonging to another person, or they might simply use a fake ID and when the criminal is arrested for a crime, they present the ID to authorities, who place charges under the identity theft victim’s name and release the criminal. When the criminal fails to appear for his court hearing, a warrant would be issued under the assumed name. The victim might learn of the incident if the state suspends their own drivers license, or through a background check performed for employment or other purposes, or in rare cases could be arrested when stopped for a minor traffic violation. It can be difficult for a criminal identity theft victim to clear their record.

How do we prevent such attack?

To prevent such attack is that one must not reveal too much of their personal details online. They must learn to know how to remain anonymous when they are online. They should not input their personal details including credit card and IC number in any web sites that seems untrustworthy. It is to do so is when there are https in the web sites address, a lock appears either above or below the window and also a trustworthy sites with a tick inside a green circle.

Besides that, they may make use of the firewalls which avoid something like viruses and spam from entering your computer. Firewalls is a single point between two or more networks where all traffic must pass (choke point) and a device that authenticats, contols and logs all traffic. Try not to download anything from a suspicious web sites since it may contain spyware or viruses because no matter how good your firewall is, if you still allows the web site to enter your computer although the firewall stated that it may be dangerous to download the file, you will still infected with spyware and etc which will lead to indentity theft since the hackers will be able to connect to your PC and gains control of it and able to view or access your files, running programs on your PC.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 6:11 am and is filed under Normal Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.