Computer Crime, E-Crime, Hi-Tech Crime or Electronic Crime is a crime in which a computer plays an essential part.

This type of crime is the illegal exploitation of computer technologies, usually involving the Internet, to support crimes such as fraud, identity theft, sharing of information, and embezzlement.

Exactly what is illegal varies greatly from territory to territory. Consequently, the growth of international data communications and in particular the Internet has made these crimes both more common and more difficult to police. Luckily there are people fighting computer crime and it is taken very seriously by government agencies. See below for a link to the U.S. Department of Justice's website about e-crime and their computer forensics activities.

Examples of computer crime are:

• Fraud achieved by the manipulation of computer records.
• Spamming where this is outlawed completely or where regulations controlling it are violated.
• Deliberate circumvention of computer security systems.
• Unauthorised access to or modification of
  • programs (see software cracking and hacking).
  • data.
• Industrial espionage by means of access to or theft of computer materials.
• Identity theft where this is accomplished by use of fraudulent computer transactions.
• Writing or spreading computer viruses or worms.
• Salami slicing is the practice of stealing money repeatedly in extremely small quantities
• Computer Viruses, of which there are two main types:

1) Macro- which attack the software on your computer such as Microsoft Word, and spread from file to file within the computer, changing or altering each one 2) Worm- this type of virus spreads via email and Internet applications

• Denial of Service Attacks, where company websites are flooded with service requests and their website is overloaded and either slowed or crashes completley

External links

• Australian Computer Abuse Research Bureau (ACARB) introduction to computer abuse concepts

• Computer Crime Research Center - Daily news about computer crime, internet fraud and cyber terrorism

• http://www.cybercrime.gov - U.S. Department of Justice cybercrime web site

• http://www.e-crimecongress.org/ecrime2005/website.asp - E-Crime Conference 2005

• U.S. Department of Justice National Institute of Justice Electonic Crime Program