Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
something that is too good to be true — that is the point — it is too good to
be true.
Types of Cybercrime : Cybercrime is so new that the very notion of
what constitutes a crime is is still open to debate. Certainly, the tradition-
ally viewed crimes, such as espionage, fraud, forgery, larceny, mischief, sabo-
tage, and so forth, are easy to cite as cybercrimes. However, once we are in
cyberspace 10.5 then things become more shadowy, and even newer crimes are
introduced such as cyberstalking , which we will discuss below. However, the
United Nations has clarified some of these issues in its document United Na-
tions Manual on the Prevention and Control of Computer-Related Crime , (see
http://www.uncjin.org/Documents/EighthCongress.html ), where such activities
as computer sabotage, unauthorized access, unauthorized copying, and the like
are included. From the first sentence therein: “The burgeoning of the world of
information technologies has, however, a negative side: it has opened the door
to antisocial and criminal behavior in ways that would never have previously
been possible.” Indeed, and this is our focus here.
Computer Espionage : Industrial espionage means obtaining propri-
etary information from an organization (which might be private enterprise or
the government), for the purpose of aiding another company or government, but
the term excludes espionage related to national security. A principal motive for
industrial espionage is for a business to improve their competitive edge, or for a
government to give an advantage to their domesticenterprises. Foreign indus-
trial espionage executed by a government is usually called economic espionage .
Typically, the greatest threat in this type of espionage is an employee within a
given organization or government, who sells the information to another party.
In industrial espionage, stolen data most destructive to the victim are intel-
ligence on pricing, processes used in manufacturing, as well as product devel-
opment and description. Other types of data stolen are a company's research;
its customer lists; as well as data on compensation; costs; negotiating positions;
personnel; proposals; sales; and strategicgoals. At the least harmful level are
activities that are actually legal and are termed separately as business intelli-
gence , such as gathering information from a company Web site, examining their
patent records, analyzing their corporate publications, and the like in order to
deduce the organization's activities.
In economic espionage, the main target is technology-related information.
By obtaining intelligence on defence systems, for instance, a country could ob-
tain information to manufacture leading-edge weapons systems without incur-
ring the costs of research and development. They could also sell or trade the
information for economic or political reasons. Espionage by foreign governments
10.5 The term cyberspace originated with William Gibson, a science fiction (the more recent
term being “speculative fiction”) author, in his novel Neuromancer (see [103]). Today, the
term cyberspace is used, typically, to mean the domain of data available via the Internet, and
computer networks, as well as the virtual environment created by the Internet. Thus, the
term is often employed to describe that new “virtual culture”, which is emerging from these
electronically interconnected communities.
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