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December 08, 2010

III - Cyber crimes – issues, problems and perspectives

A simple way of achieving this would be to subscribe the victim’s email address to a large number of mailing lists. Mailing lists are special interest groups that share and exchange information on a common topic of interest with one another via email. Mailing lists are very popular and can generate a lot of daily email traffic - depending upon the mailing list. Some generate only a few messages per day others generate hundreds. If a person has been unknowingly subscribed to hundreds of mailing lists, his incoming email traffic will be too large and his service provider will probably delete his account.
The simplest email bomb is an ordinary email account. All that one has to do is compose a message, enter the email address of the victim multiple times in the “To” field, and press the “Send” button many times. Writing the email address 25 times and pressing the “Send” button just 50 times (it will take less than a minute) will send 1250 email messages to the victim! If a group of 10 people do this for an hour, the result would be 750,000 emails!
There are several hacking tools available to automate the process of email bombing. These tools send multiple emails from many different email servers, which makes it very difficult, for the victim to protect himself.
6.4 Threatening emails: Email is a useful tool for technology savvy criminals thanks to the relative anonymity offered by it. It becomes fairly easy for anyone with even a basic knowledge of computers to become a blackmailer by threatening someone via e-mail.
6.5 Defamatory emails: cyber-defamation or even cyber-slander could be attacking a person and trying to malign his/her name through the use of computers. In this type of attacks the perpetuators of the crime can remain anonymous. Cyber defamation can prove to be very harmful and even fatal to the people who have been made its victims
7. Forgery:  Counterfeit currency notes, postage and revenue stamps, mark sheets etc can be forged using sophisticated computers, printers and scanners. These are made using computers, and high quality scanners and printers. In fact, this has becoming a booming business involving large amounts of money being given to student gangs in exchange for these bogus but authentic looking certificates.
8. Cyber stalking:  The Oxford dictionary defines stalking as "pursuing stealthily". Cyber stalking involves following a person's movements across the Internet by posting messages (sometimes threatening) on the bulletin boards frequented by the victim, entering the chat-rooms frequented by the victim, constantly bombarding the victim with emails etc.
9. Let us examine some of the acts wherein the computer is the target for an unlawful act. It may be noted that in these activities the computer may also be a tool. This kind of activity usually involves sophisticated crimes usually out of the purview of conventional criminal law. Some examples are:
9.1 Unauthorized access to computer systems or networks:  This activity is commonly referred to as hacking.

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