Conviction in Digital Crimes

We have been facing cyber crimes ever since the Internet Age started. The level of sophistication involved in these cyber crimes have been evolving very rapidly over the past decade. We have seen targeted attacks, cyber warfare, high level recon and even sophisticated malwares designed to do a specific task. We have also seen smart botnets which help attacker to carry out massive D-DOS attacks up to speed of 400Gbps.

What makes bad guys do this?

Curiosity, jealousy, revenge, show-off, political motivation, Money and Fame can be strong reasons for Cyber Crimes. These crimes are not at all new. Just the MEDIUM of COMMITTING CRIME has changed. All such crimes like bank robbery, defamation of companies, transaction frauds, harassment and blackmailing were also happening earlier, but at a physical level. As the technology has evolved, criminals have adapted to new environment around them. Even technology is a factor of motivation for committing a cyber crime.

The cyber world with all advanced technologies, have made life of a criminal very easy. People think by sitting on their laptop/machine they can commit a cyber crime in other part of the world and will never be held responsible for it. Most of the time, the person committing a cyber crime is not even aware of the situation. Such people are explorers who just keep finding loopholes/flaws in existing systems.

The motivation of cyber crime depends upon their knowledge category. People with technology can be classified into below given category:

NOOBs: These are the people with less knowledge and more of curiosity. They are highly motivated by their curiosity to find some or the other flaw in the system. The end result for such N00B is either they get trapped or become puppet of some PROs.

ELITEs: These are skilled people who are motivated by some third party. This third party can be any individual, rival company or even political motivation. The cyber crime committed by such ELITEs is on a small scale like targeting an individual, targeting a small organization or even blackmailing someone using cyber space as medium.

PROs: Cyber warfare and targeted attacks fall in this category. Highly skilled, exploit writers and guys performing massive cyber attacks are PROs. Motivation factor for such people is mostly MONEY. They develop techniques to collect ransom using BitCoins (untraceable money). Even corporate competition pays such crackers to defame rival organization.

“No matter how good you are, you can be traced”.