Amit in his firm

WELCOME , TO THIS INFORMATIVE WINDOW THROUGH WHICH U CAN SEE THE REST OF THE WORLD ********************
HERE ARE SOME FACTS 'BOUT CYBER CRIME WHICH AMY HELP U IN VARIOUS ASPECTS......
Introduction to Cyber Crime
The first recorded cyber crime took place in the year 1820! That is not surprising considering the fact that the abacus, which is thought to be the earliest form of a computer, has been around since 3500 B.C. in India, Japan and China. The era of modern computers, however, began with the analytical engine of Charles Babbage. In 1820, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a textile manufacturer in France, produced the loom. This device allowed the repetition of a series of steps in the weaving of special fabrics. This resulted in a fear amongst Jacquard's employees that their traditional employment and livelihood were being threatened. They committed acts of sabotage to discourage Jacquard from further use of the new technology. This is the first recorded cyber crime!

Next time you provide fictitious details about yourself on the net or use offensive language, you could risk being sent to jail for it. As a new proposed law brings all this under the ambit of the IT Act, DT does a reality check.
While making your email ID or opening a new account on a social networking site, did you fudge your details like 90 per cent of the net users do? After all, chatting or making a profile on a social networking site on the net has always been about being what you want to be rather than what you are.
The maximum number of net users, for reasons ranging from the innocuous to the criminal, never reveal their real details on the net. But if a recent government move is anything to go by, it will have none of it anymore. Furnishing false details or having a false identity on the net may soon become a punishable offence. DTfocuses on the changing laws in cyberia.
The new cyber crimes
The minister of state in the communications and information technology ministry said recently that the existing laws will be amended to primarily fight new forms of cyber crimes like phishing, identity thefts, video voyeurism and sexually explicit material on the net. But to tackle these bigger crimes, the government wants to make the net transparent. “Another section would be added in the proposed Information Technology Act 2006, which would make it a punishable offence to provide any false information on the net. It will be punishable by imprisonment of up ‘to two years,” says an official at the ministry And not only this, people who use offensive language on the net can also find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
The much-talked-about obscene MMSes will also be punishable, “Under the new proposed law, capturing images of an individual and transmitting them without his/her consent will be considered a crime,” says the official.
‘Two years? Are you kidding?’
That’s how most of the youngsters react to the clauses of the proposed law. Dhiren Ahuja, a 15-year-old student who has given his details as a 25-year- old jet-setting executive on a networking site, asks, “But these sites are meant for fun. What’s the harm if I provide a few false details? And not just me, all my friends do the same on the net.”
Concurs 23-year-old sales exec Neha Sareen, “With all kinds of perverts on the net, why would any sane person want to reveal all true details? Also, as far as posting offensive messages are concerned, who will decide the definition of offensive?”
THIS COULD LAND YOU IN PRISON...
Giving false details about yourself while making an email ID
Having a false identity on the net
Publishing of material containing sexually explicit acts in electronic form
Video voyeurism
Breach of confidentiality and leakage of data by service providers
E-commerce frauds, phishing and identity theft
Sending offensive messages
Capturing images of a person without his/her knowledge and transmitting them without his/her consent
Actor Shreyas Talpade found himself an unlikely victim of this trend recently “I was on a social networking site. I used to get so many scraps asking me if I was the real Shreyas. I withdrew from the site and I recently came to know that there were 10 fake Shreyas Talpades there!”
Model-turned-actor Rajneesh Duggal says, “Internet should be used for the right reasons. If this screening process is put through, the number of web frauds and harassment issues will be addressed.”

Whither implementation?
The experts feel so too. Says NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik, “The proposed act will discourage illegal activities on the Net I expect a substantial reduction in impersonation and harassment cases.”
However, there are still a lot of loose ends in the law. A senior Delhi Police official says, “I have my reservations about the proposed changes. It is difficult to catch people with fake addresses.
We will have to see what kind of system of implementation they come up with.”
Cyber law expert Pawan Duggal adds, “I feel the punishment should be decided keeping the gravity of the crime in mind. There are issues like phishing, electronic payment, cyber terrorism that are not covered completely under the new act.”
Neha, who had earlier lodged a complaint after somebody made her fake profile on a site, is all for the new law. “Somebody made an obscene profile of mine, with indecent scraps and a morphed picture and posted it to all my friends. I was completely shattered. With these laws in place, such people will be easily found out.”


Frequently Used Cyber Crimes
Unauthorized access to computer systems or networks
This activity is commonly referred to as hacking. The Indian law has however given a different connotation to the term hacking, so we will not use the term "unauthorized access" interchangeably with the term "hacking".
Theft of information contained in electronic form
This includes information stored in computer hard disks, removable storage media etc.
Email bombing
Email bombing refers to sending a large number of emails to the victim resulting in the victim's email account (in case of an individual) or mail servers (in case of a company or an email service provider) crashing. In one case, a foreigner who had been residing in Simla, India for almost thirty years wanted to avail of a scheme introduced by the Simla Housing Board to buy land at lower rates. When he made an application it was rejected on the grounds that the 169 schemes was available only for citizens of India. He decided to take his revenge. Consequently he sent thousands of mails to the Simla Housing Board and repeatedly kept sending e-mails till their servers crashed.
Data diddling
This kind of an attack involves altering raw data just before it is processed by a computer and then changing it back after the processing is completed. Electricity Boards in India have been victims to data diddling programs inserted when private parties were computerizing their systems.
Salami attacks
These attacks are used for the commission of financial crimes. The key here is to make the alteration so insignificant that in a single case it would go completely unnoticed. E.g. a bank employee inserts a program, into the bank's servers, that deducts a small amount of money (say Rs. 5 a month) from the account of every customer. No account holder will probably notice this unauthorized debit, but the bank employee will make a sizable amount of money every month.
To cite an example, an employee of a bank in USA was dismissed from his job. Disgruntled at having been supposedly mistreated by his employers the man first introduced a logic bomb into the bank's systems.
Logic bombs are programmes, which are activated on the occurrence of a particular predefined event. The logic bomb was programmed to take ten cents from all the accounts in the bank and put them into the account of the person whose name was alphabetically the last in the bank's rosters. Then he went and opened an account in the name of Ziegler. The amount being withdrawn from each of the accounts in the bank was so insignificant that neither any of the account holders nor the bank officials noticed the fault.
It was brought to their notice when a person by the name of Zygler opened his account in that bank. He was surprised to find a sizable amount of money being transferred into his account every Saturday.
Denial of Service attack
This involves flooding a computer resource with more requests than it can handle. This causes the resource (e.g. a web server) to crash thereby denying authorized users the service offered by the resource. Another variation to a typical denial of service attack is known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack wherein the perpetrators are many and are geographically widespread. It is very difficult to control such attacks. The attack is initiated by sending excessive demands to the victim's computer(s), exceeding the limit that the victim's servers can support and making the servers crash. Denial-of-service attacks have had an impressive history having, in the past, brought down websites like Amazon, CNN, Yahoo and eBay!
Virus / worm attacks
Viruses are programs that attach themselves to a computer or a file and then circulate themselves to other files and to other computers on a network. They usually affect the data on a computer, either by altering or deleting it. Worms, unlike viruses do not need the host to attach themselves to. They merely make functional copies of themselves and do this repeatedly till they eat up all the available space on a computer's memory. 170 The VBS_LOVELETTER virus (better known as the Love Bug or the ILOVEYOU virus) was reportedly written by a Filipino undergraduate.
In May 2000, this deadly virus beat the Melissa virus hollow - it became the world's most prevalent virus. It struck one in every five personal computers in the world. When the virus was brought under check the true magnitude of the losses was incomprehensible. Losses incurred during this virus attack were pegged at US $ 10 billion.
The original VBS_LOVELETTER utilized the addresses in Microsoft Outlook and emailed itself to those addresses. The e-mail, which was sent out, had "ILOVEYOU" in its subject line. The attachment file was named "LOVE-LETTER-FORYOU. TXT.vbs". The subject line and those who had some knowledge of viruses, did not notice the tiny .vbs extension and believed the file to be a text file conquered people wary of opening e-mail attachments. The message in the e-mail was "kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me".
Since the initial outbreak over thirty variants of the virus have been developed many of them following the original by just a few weeks. In addition, the Love Bug also uses the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for its propagation. It e-mails itself to users in the same channel as the infected user. Unlike the Melissa virus this virus does have a destructive effect. Whereas the Melissa, once installed, merely inserts some text into the affected documents at a particular instant during the day, VBS_LOVELETTER first selects certain files and then inserts its own code in lieu of the original data contained in the file. This way it creates ever-increasing versions of itself. Probably the world's most famous worm was the Internet worm let loose on the Internet by Robert Morris sometime in 1988. The Internet was, then, still in its developing years and this worm, which affected thousands of computers, almost brought its development to a complete halt. It took a team of experts almost three days to get rid of the worm and in the meantime many of the computers had to be disconnected from the network.
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-------------------------------------AMIT KUMAR TIWARI (Harsh Raj)