SUMMARIZE THE CHAPTER

Crime (Chapter 5) An friend of mine used to tell me a story about going on a date when he was in his twentys. This would have been sometime in the early 1980's. He did not have a checking account or credit card, and had negelcted to get money out of the bank to pay for the date, so he only had enough money to pay for one dinner, and he told his date that he was not very hungry, so he didn't order anything. This situation usually would not happen today because people have constant access to their bank accounts. There is no doubt that technological information storage and commerce have made our lives more convenient. We can withdraw cash from ATM's, and shop with credit and debit cards. Beyond this, we We can shop in online stores, buy plane tickets and tickets to sporting events and make online payments. Social networking sites like Facebook allow us to keep in touch with our friends and other colleagues thousands of miles away. Along with making information sharing and commerce more convenient, however, computers and the Internet have facilitated new classes of crime, including Hacking, Itentity Theft, Credit Card Fraud, Online Auction Fraud, Computer Viruses and Digital Forgery, to name a few. Hacking: Much early hacking was not particularly malicious. People hacked into systems simply because they could. They did it for fun, for the challenge and sense of accomplishment. Others hacked the phone system so they could make free long-distance phone calls. Apple's founders built and sold "blue boxes" to do this in college. These would produce command tones that directed the phone system not to charge for long distance calls. Later, as the Internet grew, more malicious and bigger hacks became possible. In 1988, the first major Internet worm affected just a few thousand computers, but twelve years later, the ILOVEYOU virus infected tens of millions of computers and caused about $10 billion in damage. In 2000, a 15 year-old Canadian shut down a number of commercial web sites with a distributed denial of service attack, causing an estimated $1.7 billion in lost revenue. Hacking has now become more malicious. It is often used for identity theft, to collect passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal information. Computer viruses can take over your computer to send spam and commit other types of online fraud. So called "Ransomware" will encrypt your hard drive and demand a payment, sometimes in Bitcoin, in order to decrypt it. In 2016, there were more than 4000 ransomware attaks daily in the US. Often victims will pay the demanded fee rather than lose important data. Viruses and other malware can be spread through various means, such as in malicious email attachments, trojan horse programs posted on websites, and through applications that work with social networking sites. According to US intelligence, the Democratic National Committee was hacked in the last election by Russian agents, in an attempt to sway the election for Donald Trump. http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/12/politics/russian-hack-donald-trump-2016-election/ Current intelligence suggests an additional concerted PR campaign by Russia to sway the election by posting fake comments and posts on traditional and social media outlets. These kinds of attacks have become much more organized in the last few years, with governments and large criminal organizations taking part in the attacks. A group called "shadow brokers" stole hacking tools from the NSA and has posted them online: http://www.npr.org/2017/06/29/534916031/shadow-brokers-group-leaks-stolen-national-security-agency-hacking-tools Identity Theft: A common form of identity theft is the stealing of credit card numbers. These can then be used directly to make purchases, or sold to others. In another form of identity theft, the thief uses someone else's social security number and personal information to open a new credit card account. The thief then uses the account, but does not pay the bill, ruining the victim's credit, and perhaps forcing him to pay the bills. Methods of identity theft range from the very simple (stealing a physical credit card, or writing down someone's credit card number during a transaction) to more sophisticated techniques, such as phishing, pharming and trojan horse malware. Phishing itself has now become much more targeted than before. Often a phishing email has a lot of facts about you, making it look legitimate. The data needed for targeted phishing attacks was already out there, but the recent Equifax data breach is particularly troubling: Online Scams: More subtle forms of fraud also exist. In online auctions, people engage in "shill bidding" to increase the perceived demand for their items. Others engage in stock fraud. They release phony reports promoting the company only to sell their shares when the stock price rises. Scams like these were common even before the Internet, but some schemes such as "click fraud" only exist on the Internet. In one form of click fraud, people who host ads repeatedly click on them to increase their revenue (or they write a program to do it). With all this fraud going on, how can we protect ourselves, our bank accounts, our social security numbers and passwords when we are online? Crime Fighting: The fact that the Internet is a global phenomenon complicates issues of venue. If you are located in California, but you do something on the net that is illegal in Florida, should Florida be able to prosecute you for it? What about if you do do something that is illegal in China on the net while residing in the U.S., and then visit China? Should China be able to arrest you? If the act is illegal in both places, where should the trial be held? If a country decides that certain content must be banned, whose responsibility is it to make sure it is not accessible within the country? Does it fall on the ISP, the host of each web site, or the country itself? Questions like these come to the forefront as soon as we consider the ramifications of computer technologies on crime fighting. Systemic problems It is interesting and scary to look at situations in which not only did individuals act unethically, but an entire system is rife with wrongdoing. This has happened quite a few times in the last couple of decades. The Enron scandal, the Bernie Madoff ponzie scheme, and the subprime crisis leading to the recession that started in 2008 are good examples of this. We can also point to predatory lending practices related to student loans. While this kind of wrongdoing happened before, computers and other technologies allow it to occur on a global scale never before imagined.