Computer Crime and Its Impacts

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Computer Crime and Its Impacts
Presentation By Timothy Mangas
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Background Information

• Why should we worry?
• Crimes committed using the computer or Internet
  can be more costly (money wise) than other crimes
  (a bank robber may get 2,500 to 5,000 on
  average while average loss from computer fraud
  is 100,000)
• Crimes are larger and affect more people (a
  hacker breaking into an e-commerce database can
  steal hundreds or thousands of credit card
  numbers)

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Background Information

• Why should we worry?
• Crimes are harder to detect and trace (e.g., the
  anonymity of the Web)
• Computing provides new challenges for prevention,
  detection, and prosecution challenges that
  professionals will be asked to meet.

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Hacking - 1960-1970

• Originally, a hacker was a creative programmer
  who wrote elegant or creative code.
• Sometimes these folks would break into the
  computer systems at their schools to experiment
  and have fun remember that until the PC and the
  Internet, computing resources were quite
  restricted.

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Hacking - 1970-1995

• The meaning of hacker began to change. There were
  incidents of trophy hacking (doing it just to
  show you could do it).
• There were also crimes, such as thefts of
  information and phone hacking
• The case of Kevin Mitnick a notorious hacker who
  was arrested in 1988 and finally tracked down and
  arrested again in 1995. He caused several million
  dollars of damage.

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Hacking - 1995-present

• Current hacking includes all previous pranks and
  crimes, but now we have the intricate
  interconnectedness of the Web.
• Every networked computer is potentially
  vulnerable. This includes basic infrastructure
  (water, power, banks, hospitals, transportation,
  government agencies, telephone companies, etc.).

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Hacking - 1995-present

• Now we have viruses transmitted via email that
  spread in a similar fashion to real diseases (but
  much faster) there often have to be quarantine
  procedures.
• The Love Bug from 2000 cost an estimated 10
  billion in damage.
• De facto standard systems (e.g., Microsoft
  Windows and Outlook) are especially vulnerable
  other systems (e.g., Mac OS) are less so but all
  are vulnerable.

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Computer Viruses

• More than 81,000 virus-type threats exist today.
• This is even more complicated because there are
  lots of virus hoaxes, which may be in the form of
  dire email warnings about disk-eating (or
  computer destroying!) attachments that may land
  in your inbox.

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Types of Viruses

• Malicious worms (e.g., the Love Bug) that
  propagate via email and destroy the contents of
  computers.
• Denial-of-service attacks more recently there
  are distributed DNS attacks.
• Back-door worms that exploit vulnerabilities to
  enter surreptitiously and copy private
  information.

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Online Scams

• Auctions
• Sell nonexistent/faulty/etc merchandise
• Response
• Credit card required to buy or sell
• Escrow services -- trusted middleman
• Fraud response
• Fraudulent escrow service
• Shill bidding

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More Online Scams

• Stock fraud
• Buy a lot of worthless stock
• Hype it on the internet
• Sell it all at the new high price
• The SEC like to get involved in these cases

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Identity Theft

• Steal credit card number
• Dumpster diving
• Dishonest store clerks
• Phone customer pretending to be bank
• Email customer pretending to be bank

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More Identity Theft

• Steal SSN (was DeFacto ID until recently)
• Use SSN to access records
• Use SSN stolen info to get credit card
• Send bill to PO box
• ATM Fraud
• Fake ATM slots in front of real ATM