A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 379

Cyber Caucus. This group collects data on cybersecurity for both congressional
use and public use.
Congress has thus far failed to pass enabling legislation on cybersecurity such
as the bill put forth by Senator Joe Lieberman (an Independent from Connecticut)
and Senator Susan Collins (a Republican from Maine). This bill failed to pass on
November 14, 2012, by a vote of 51 to 47. The name of the bill was the Lieberman
Collins Cyber Security Bill.
This failure by Congress to take effective action on cybersecurity is yet another
sign that Congress has become inept at dealing with cybercrime. With cybersecur-
ity, congressional failure is often worse than ineffective: It is actually harmful to
the U.S. infrastructure.
Although cooperation and coordination among these disparate groups were
suboptimal, at least computer and software security was getting serious attention
by competent research teams.
Increasing Seriousness of Cyberattacks
The existence of valuable commodities such as credit card numbers that could be
sold or used naturally attracted criminals that had computer skills, which by the
late 1990s was very common.
Compared to stealing physical objects such as money, stocks, jewelry, or elec-
tronics, the theft of computer records has some distinct advantages. First, the
stolen materials have no physical presence and can be removed at almost the speed
of light and relocated to any other computer in the world in any country.
Unlike the theft of physical objects, theft of data does not necessarily remove
the stolen material; it only makes a copy. This makes tracking of stolen objects
difficult because they usually are still in place, but a copy has been made.
Computer theft is also fairly hard to track, and even when specific computers
are identified that took part in the theft, there is no easy way of knowing who ac-
tually used them to commit a crime.
Apprehending a clever and skilled hacking group is not impossible, but the rate
of apprehension is probably well below the apprehension rate of armed robberies.
Even so, monthly arrests for cybercrime currently top 500 per month in industrial-
ized countries.
A second factor leading to an increase in computer crime is the attention paid
to computers and the internet by political activists. The term hactivism was coined