Origins of Cyber Crime

Cyber crime is one of the most common types of criminal acts as of 2010. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Crime Center, there were a reported 336,655 complaints about attempted or successful Internet crime in 2009. Although people sometimes think of cyber crime as a recent phenomenon, it actually has origins dating back several decades.

History

Cyber-criminals, sometimes called "blackhatters," received notoriety in 1971 when John Draper managed to figure out a way to make long distance calls for free, according to "Cybercrime: A Reference Handbook." Draper used a toy whistle to fool AT&T systems into thinking a call had ended, thereby stopping charges. Another important case occurred in 1985 when two hackers stole a telecom engineer's password and left messages for the Duke of Edinburgh.

Computer Viruses

For most of its early history, cyber crime was often via non-technical means, such as looking over someone's shoulder for a password or masquerading as a computer technician. In the late 1990s, two viruses--"Melissa" and "I Love You"--started spreading around the Internet causing slowdowns and damage, and making the public more aware of the dangers of virtual crime, according to TIME.

Significance

In some respects, the state of modern cyber crime reflects the origins of the first hackers. Before blackhats, benevolent "whitehats" from MIT genuinely wanted to use hacking for good. They based this on the idea that one should gain recognition for ingenuity based on creativity and results, not education or conferral, according to the Cybercrime Reference Handbook. Additionally, the whitehats felt that the government should not keep software and info from the public.

Modern History

Cyber-crime took a big leap forward from petty crime to costly and attention-getting when in 2000 Canadian hacker MafiaBoy created the "denial of service" attack, according to CIO. A "DoS" attack deluges a Web server with so much information that legitimate users cannot send requests. The first attack took down the biggest sites of the day, such as CNN, Yahoo! and Amazon. This attack cost companies millions and gave people the idea to do this for extortion and other criminal pursuits.

The Future

Cyber crime should become a bigger problem as time goes on, according to TIME. In 2009, president Obama considered opening a cyber warfare command center, partly in response to the 360 million attempts to infiltrate government computers in 2008. Cyber criminal attacks are getting potentially more costly than the "phone phreaking" attempts of Draper. In 2008, a likely Chinese hacker successfully stole plans for the $300 billion U.S. Joint Strike Fighter.

References

• Internet Crime Complaint Center: 2009 Internet Crime Report
• Cybercrime: A Reference Handbook; Bernadette Hlubik Schell, Clemens Martin; 2004
• TIME Magazine: Cybercrime
• CIO: A Brief History of Malware and Cybercrime