CYBER CRIME

Any criminal activity that uses a computer either as an instrumentality, target or a means for perpetuating further crimes comes within the ambit of cyber crime(12) A generalized definition of cyber crime may be unlawful acts wherein the computer is either a tool or target or both(3) The computer may be used as a tool in the following kinds of activityfinancial crimes, sale of illegal articles, pornography, online gambling, intellectual property crime, e-mail spoofing, forgery, cyber defamation, cyber stalking. The computer may however be target for unlawful acts in the following cases- unauthorized access to computer/ computer system/ computer networks, theft of information contained in the electronic form, e-mail bombing, data didling, salami attacks, logic bombs, Trojan attacks, internet time thefts, web jacking, theft of computer system, physically damaging the computer system. MODE AND MANNER OF COMMITING CYBER CRIME: 1. Unauthorized access to computer systems or networks / HackingThis kind of offence is normally referred as hacking in the generic sense. However the framers of the information technology act 2000 have no where used this term so to avoid any confusion we would not interchangeably use the word hacking for unauthorized access as the latter has wide connotation. 2. Theft of information contained in electronic formThis includes information stored in computer hard disks, removable storage media etc. Theft may be either by appropriating the data physically or by tampering them through the virtual medium.

3. Email bombingThis kind of activity refers to sending large numbers of mail to the victim, which may be an individual or a company or even mail servers there by ultimately resulting into crashing. 4. Data diddlingThis kind of an attack involves altering raw data just before a computer processes it and then changing it back after the processing is completed. The electricity board faced similar problem of data diddling while the department was being computerised. 5. Salami attacksThis kind of crime is normally prevalent in the financial institutions or for the purpose of committing financial crimes. An important feature of this type of offence is that the alteration is so small that it would normally go unnoticed. E.g. the Ziegler case wherein a logic bomb was introduced in the banks system, which deducted 10 cents from every account and deposited it in a particular account. 6. Denial of Service attackThe computer of the victim is flooded with more requests than it can handle which cause it to crash. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is also a type of denial of service attack, in which the offenders are wide in number and widespread. E.g. Amazon, Yahoo. 7. Virus / worm attacksViruses 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. E.g. love bug virus, which affected at least 5 % of the computers of the globe. The losses were accounted to be $ 10 million. The world's most famous worm was the Internet worm let loose on the Internet by Robert Morris sometime in 1988. Almost brought development of Internet to a complete halt. 8. Logic bombsThese are event dependent programs. This implies that these programs are created to do something only when a certain event (known as a trigger event) occurs. E.g. even some viruses may be termed logic bombs because they lie dormant all through the year and become active only on a particular date (like the Chernobyl virus). 9. Trojan attacksThis term has its origin in the word Trojan horse. In software field this means an unauthorized programme, which passively gains control over anothers system by representing itself as an authorised programme. The most common form of installing a Trojan is through e-mail. E.g. a Trojan was installed in the computer of a lady film director in the U.S. while chatting. The cyber criminal through the web cam installed in the computer obtained her nude photographs. He further harassed this lady. 10. Internet time thefts-

Normally in these kinds of thefts the Internet surfing hours of the victim are used up by another person. This is done by gaining access to the login ID and the password. E.g. Colonel Bajwas casethe Internet hours were used up by any other person. This was perhaps one of the first reported cases related to cyber crime in

India. However this case made the police infamous as to their lack of understanding of the nature of cyber crime. 11. Web jackingThis term is derived from the term hi jacking. In these kinds of offences the hacker gains access and control over the web site of another. He may even mutilate or change the information on the site. This may be done for fulfilling political objectives or for money. E.g. recently the site of MIT (Ministry of Information Technology) was hacked by the Pakistani hackers and some obscene matter was placed therein. Further the site of Bombay crime branch was also web jacked. Another case of web jacking is that of the gold fish case. In this case the site was hacked and the information pertaining to gold fish was changed. Further a ransom of US $ 1 million was demanded as ransom. Thus web jacking is a process where by control over the site of another is made backed by some consideration for it.

Points the attacker can target

As mentioned, the vulnerability of a system exists at the entry and exit points within the system. Figure 3 shows an e-Commerce system with several points that the attacker can target:

Shopper Shopper' computer Network connection between shopper and Web site's server Web site's server Software vendor

Figure 3. Points the attacker can target

These target points and their exploits are explored later in this article. Back to top

Attacks
This section describes potential security attack methods from an attacker or hacker.

Tricking the shopper

Some of the easiest and most profitable attacks are based on tricking the shopper, also known as social engineering techniques. These attacks involve surveillance of the shopper's behavior, gathering information to use against the shopper. For example, a mother's maiden name is a common challenge question used by numerous sites. If one of these sites is tricked into giving away a password once the challenge question is provided, then not only has

this site been compromised, but it is also likely that the shopper used the same logon ID and password on other sites. A common scenario is that the attacker calls the shopper, pretending to be a representative from a site visited, and extracts information. The attacker then calls a customer service representative at the site, posing as the shopper and providing personal information. The attacker then asks for the password to be reset to a specific value. Another common form of social engineering attacks are phishing schemes. Typo pirates play on the names of famous sites to collect authentication and registration information. For example, http://www.ibm.com/shop is registered by the attacker as www.ibn.com/shop. A shopper mistypes and enters the illegitimate site and provides confidential information. Alternatively, the attacker sends emails spoofed to look like they came from legitimate sites. The link inside the email maps to a rogue site that collects the information.

Snooping the shopper's computer

Millions of computers are added to the Internet every month. Most users' knowledge of security vulnerabilities of their systems is vague at best. Additionally, software and hardware vendors, in their quest to ensure that their products are easy to install, will ship products with security features disabled. In most cases, enabling security features requires a non-technical user to read manuals written for the technologist. The confused user does not attempt to enable the security features. This creates a treasure trove for attackers. A popular technique for gaining entry into the shopper's system is to use a tool, such as SATAN, to perform port scans on a computer that detect entry points into the machine. Based on the opened ports found, the attacker can use various techniques to gain entry into the user's system. Upon entry, they scan your file system for personal information, such as passwords. While software and hardware security solutions available protect the public's systems, they are not silver bullets. A user that purchases firewall software to protect his computer may find there are conflicts with other software on his system. To resolve the conflict, the user disables enough capabilities to render the firewall software useless.

Sniffing the network

In this scheme, the attacker monitors the data between the shopper's computer and the server. He collects data about the shopper or steals personal information, such as credit card numbers.

There are points in the network where this attack is more practical than others. If the attacker sits in the middle of the network, then within the scope of the Internet, this attack becomes impractical. A request from the client to the server computer is broken up into small pieces known as packets as it leaves the client's computer and is reconstructed at the server. The packets of a request is sent through different routes. The attacker cannot access all the packets of a request and cannot decipher what message was sent. Take the example of a shopper in Toronto purchasing goods from a store in Los Angeles. Some packets for a request are routed through New York, where others are routed through Chicago. A more practical location for this attack is near the shopper's computer or the server. Wireless hubs make attacks on the shopper's computer network the better choice because most wireless hubs are shipped with security features disabled. This allows an attacker to easily scan unencrypted traffic from the user's computer. Figure 4. Attacker sniffing the network between client and server

Guessing passwords
Another common attack is to guess a user's password. This style of attack is manual or automated. Manual attacks are laborious, and only successful if the attacker knows something about the shopper. For example, if the shopper uses their child's name as the password. Automated attacks have a higher likelihood of success, because the probability of guessing a user ID/password becomes more significant as the number of tries increases. Tools exist that use all the words in the dictionary to test user ID/password combinations, or that attack popular user ID/password combinations. The attacker can automate to go against multiple sites at one time.

Using denial of service attacks

The denial of service attack is one of the best examples of impacting site availability. It involves getting the server to perform a large number of mundane tasks, exceeding the capacity of the server to cope with any other task. For example, if everyone in a large

meeting asks you your name all at once, and every time you answer, they ask you again. You have experienced a personal denial of service attack. To ask a computer its name, you use ping. You can use ping to build an effective DoS attack. The smart hacker gets the server to use more computational resources in processing the request than the adversary does in generating the request. Distributed DoS is a type of attack used on popular sites, such as Yahoo!. In this type of attack, the hacker infects computers on the Internet via a virus or other means. The infected computer becomes slaves to the hacker. The hacker controls them at a predetermined time to bombard the target server with useless, but intensive resource consuming requests. This attack not only causes the target site to experience problems, but also the entire Internet as the number of packets is routed via many different paths to the target. Figure 5. Denial of service attacks

Using known server bugs

The attacker analyzes the site to find what types of software are used on the site. He then proceeds to find what patches were issued for the software. Additionally, he searches on how to exploit a system without the patch. He proceeds to try each of the exploits. The sophisticated attacker finds a weakness in a similar type of software, and tries to use that to exploit the system. This is a simple, but effective attack. With millions of servers online, what is the probability that a system administrator forgot to apply a patch?

Using server root exploits

Root exploits refer to techniques that gain super user access to the server. This is the most coveted type of exploit because the possibilities are limitless. When you attack a shopper or his computer, you can only affect one individual. With a root exploit, you gain control of the merchants and all the shoppers' information

on the site. There are two main types of root exploits: buffer overflow attacks and executing scripts against a server. In a buffer overflow attack, the hacker takes advantage of specific type of computer program bug that involves the allocation of storage during program execution. The technique involves tricking the server into execute code written by the attacker. The other technique uses knowledge of scripts that are executed by the server. This is easily and freely found in the programming guides for the server. The attacker tries to construct scripts in the URL of his browser to retrieve information from his server. This technique is frequently used when the attacker is trying to retrieve data from the server's database.