ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203)

EDUCATION AND LANGUAGE FACCULTY

OUMH1203

CYBER CRIMES IN MALAYSIA AND U.S.A: WHAT SHOULD WE DO IN MALAYSIA?

NAME MATRIKULASI NO. IC NO. TELEPHONE NO E-MAIL

: : : : :

PUSAT PEMBELAJARAN

: OUM
Js

ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203) CYBER CRIMES IN MALAYSIA AND U.S.A: WHAT SHOULD WE DO IN MALAYSIA?

Crime is the rupture of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction. Individual human societies may each define crime and crimes differently, in different localities. Computer crime is known by lots of different names, including cybercrime, e-crime, or electronic crime. All of these are crimes where computers or networks are used or attacked. These electronic crimes are being used to steal identities and huge sums of money. Many traditional crimes such as theft, blackmail, forgery, embezzlement and fraud today are all conducted on the internet. Cybercrimes is the latest and perhaps the most complicated problem in the cyber world. The term cyber crime is am misnomer. Cyber crime maybe said to be those species of genus, and the computer is an object or subject of the conduct constituting crime. Crime and criminality have taken society to the next level of evolution. Crime remains elusive and ever strives to hide itself in the face of development. Cybercrime is defined as crime committed on the internet using the computer as either a tool or a target victim or both. It is used in the following kinds of activities such as financial crimes, pornography, online gambling, email spoofing, cyber defamation, cyber stalking, forgery, property crime and many more. The computer may however be target for unlawful acts in the following cases as computer hacking, email bombing, internet time theft, web jacking and so on. The thefts of the computer system will physically damaging the computer system. This includes anything from downloading illegal music files to stealing millions of dollars from online bank accounts. Cybercrime also includes non-monetary offenses, such as creating and distributing viruses on other computers or posting confidential business information on the internet. Perhaps the most prominent form of cybercrime is identity theft, in which criminal use the internet to steal personal information from other users. Two of the common ways is done through phishing and pharming. Both of these methods lure users to fake website, where they are asked to enter personal information. This include login information, such as usernames and passwords, phone numbers, addresses, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and other information criminals can use to steal another persons identity. For this reason, it is smart to check the URL or web address of the site to make sure it is legitimate before entering your personal information.
Js

ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203) Since cybercrime covers such as a broad scope of criminal activity, the examples above are only a few of the thousands of crimes that are considered cybercrime. While computers and the internet have made our live easier in many ways, it is unfortunate that people also use these technologies to take advantage of others. The cybercrime can be classified into many categories, as there are four major categories of it. Those four majors are cyber crime against individual, cyber crime against property, cyber crime against organization, and cyber crime against society. Cyber crimes committed against persons include various crimes like transmission of child-pornography, harassment of any one with the use of a computer such as e-mail. The trafficking, distribution, posting, and dissemination of obscene material including pornography and indecent exposure, constitutes one of the most important cyber crimes known today. The potential harm of such a crime to humanity can hardly be amplified. This one cyber crime threatens to undermine the growth of the younger generation as also leave irreparable scars and injury on the younger generation, if not controlled. For instance, a man, who, along with his friends, attempted to gang rape, lured a minor girl to a private place through cyber chat. Cyber harassment is a dissimilar cyber crime. Various kinds of harassment can and do occur in cyberspace. Harassment can be sexual, racial, religious, or other. Persons perpetuating such harassment are also guilty of cybercrimes. Cyberharassment as a crime also brings us to another related area of violation of privacy of citizens. Violation of privacy of online citizens is a cybercrime of a grave nature. No one likes any other person invading the invaluable and extremely touchy area of his or her own privacy, which the medium of internet grants to the citizen. Aside from that, another example wherein the damage was not done to a person but to the masses is the case of the Melissa virus. The Melissa virus first appeared on the internet in March of 1999. It spread rapidly throughout computer systems in the United States and Europe. The virus caused eighty million dollars approximately in damages to computers worldwide. In the United States alone, the virus made its way through 1.2 million computers in one-fifth of the country's largest businesses. David Smith pleaded guilty on December 9, 1999 to state and federal charges associated with his creation of the Melissa virus. There are numerous examples of such computer viruses few of them being "Melissa" and "love bug". A Mumbai-based upstart engineering company lost a say and much money in the business when the rival company, an industry major, stole the technical database from their computers with the help of a corporate cyber spy. These crimes include computer vandalism by the destruction of others
Js

ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203) property and the transmission of harmful programs. Therefore, these crimes are sort in the second category that is cyber crime against all forms of property. There are kinds in this category such as internet time theft which the usage of the internet hours by an unauthorized person which is actually paid by another person, also the intellectual property crime that includes software piracy by doing illegal copying programs, distribution of copies of software and some credit card fraud. The third category is cyber crime against organization. These include crimes against government, private firm, company, group of individual. These crimes included unauthorized accessing of computer, denial of service, virus attack, email bombing, salami attack, logic bomb, Trojan horse, data diddling and others cyber terrorism against the government organization. Accessing the computer or network without permission from the owner an it can be formed in two forms that is changing or deleting data by using an unauthorized changing of data, and computer voyeur where the criminal reads or copies of confidential or proprietary information, but the data is neither deleted nor changed. When internet server is flooded with continuous bogus requests so as to denying legitimate users to use the server or to crash the server is called the denial of service.A computer virus is a computer program that can infect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a copy of it that could possibly evolved. Viruses can be file infecting or affecting boot sector of the computer. Worms, unlike viruses do not need the host to attach themselves to. Therefore, these are the virus attack of having cyber crime especially against the organization. Email bombing is an act of sending large numbers of mails to the individual or company or mail servers thereby ultimately resulting into crashing, whereas the salami attack happens when neglible amounts are removed and accumulated into something larger. These attacks are used for the commision of financial crimes. Logic bomb is an event dependent programme, as soon as the designated event occur, it crashes the computer, release a virus or any other harmful possibilities, while an authorized program which functions from inside what seems to be an authorized program, thereby concealing what it is actually doing is known as trojan horse. Another attack that involves altering raw data just before it is processed by a computer and then changing it back after the processing is completed is called data iddling. These crimes not only affect individual or any organization but the society or also known as the cyber crime against society. It included forgery, cyber terrorism, child pornography, financial crimes, sale of illegal articles, web jacking, online gambling and
Js

ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203) polluting the youth through indecent exposure. Forgery in cyber crime also known as faking, imitating, and counterfeit usually takes over by the currency notes, revenue stamps, and mark sheets can be forged by using computers and high quality scanners and printers. Cyber terrorism in general, can be well defined as an act of terrorism dedicated using cyber space or computer resources. As such, a simple propaganda in the internet, that there will be bomb attacks during the holidays can be considered cyberterrorism. As well, there are also hacking activities directed towards individuals, families, organized by groups within networks, tending to cause fear among people, demonstrate power, collecting information relevant for ruining peoples' lives, robberies, even blackmailing. Web jacking happens when the hackers gain access and control over the website of another even they change the content of website for fulfilling political objective or for money. In USA, the majority of non-misdemeanor crimes are property crimeswhere these are nonaggressive offenses that include burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft. Financial and cybercrimes are the most common crimes committed in Malaysia, according to Malaysian national news outlet Bernama. Tommy Seah, honorary group chairperson of International Cybercrime and Forensics Examiner Group of Companies, said the most prevalent of financial crimes in Malaysia were financial statement frauds, procurement frauds and misappropriation of assets.Malaysia is a pretty passive country but we are also not well equipped in preventing such crimes, he said in an interview with Bernama on Tuesday. Skills and knowledge can be transferred and acquired and Malaysia has the ability, but the corporate will to put the house in order is more vital.Seah said one of the reasons why people commit economic crimes is their desire for a better quality of life because when they cannot achieve that legitimately, they tend to adopt illegal ways of getting what they want. This is because those who succeed in their career will be able to live in luxurious life, unlike to those who are not able to build their own successful career where they live in a slum and survive especially when the economic urge them to work harder to pay for their surviving needs. Malaysian Computer Crimes Act (CCA 1997) and the Communication and Multimedia Act 1998, which are the many cyber laws enacted in Malaysia. The punishment may range from three years to ten years imprisonment with or monetary fine of between RM 25,000 to RM 150,000. SANS Institute, 2002 quote that note that stiffer penalties will be given if it is found that the guilty party had intention to cause injury when committing the crime. Meaning to say that the penalties only be given if the guilty party who had committing the crime having bad
Js

ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203) intention that maycause to injury. Even so, there is plenty of Malaysian did not do this illegal crime because of tight penalties will be given that impossible to be afforded by the theft. Furthermore, nowadays, Malaysia is getting acknowledgement by the whole world, so, there is no much time to be wasted as all the government worker especially are gathered to make Malaysia known by the world. Strong working relationships between authorities in countries around the world can help to solve cyber crimes cases quickly. The Malaysian Parliament website that was hacked on December 2000 was traced to IP addresses in Brazil and France. The relevant authorities in those countries were contacted for assistance in the investigation. Cybersecurity Malaysia is not an enforcement agency but it is an agency under Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation (MOSTI). It also provide support to enforcement agencies such as police an victims, in ensuring that integrity will conquer regardless of the space where a precise crime is conducted. It is also assist in cyber forensics and analysis for instance analyzing evidence and on condition, those expert witnesses for significant cases. Therefore, such crime can be detected easily with the help of all support for example analyzing evidence of the address tracked. Thats why in almost cyber caf, they have a cable on every CPU for the headquarter to keep on eye on what happen to the surrounding especially on what site did the customer or client visit aside from the surveillance from the CCTV. In 2008, CyberSecurity Malaysia handled 2,123 incidents that is more than 100 percent increase compared with 2007. However, the rate was increase in incidents and it may not associate with cyber crime rates. Based on statistic from the MyCERT Incident Statistics for the year 2011, the Reported Incidents Based on General Incident Classification Statistics 2011, claims that the most incident are from the fraud cases, that make up about majority of cyber crime among each month in this year, whereas the least incidents are from the content related that not every month these kind of crime is committed.A statistic that was derived from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in collaboration with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (ic3) for cyber crime statistic year 2010 in USA that was published on February 27th , 2011 claims that the most percent of the cyber crime goes to the non-delivery Payment or merchandise, whereas the least are both from credit card fraud and overpayment fraud.Fraud in the USA are in various types, for instance overpayment fraud, credit card fraud, auction fraud, advance fee fraud, and miscellaneous fraud.

Js

ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203) . Prevention is always better than cure. It is always better to take certain precaution while

operation the net. Not only in Malaysia these prevention should be carry out, but the whole user of cyber are warned to do the same. To prevent cyber stalking, avoid disclosing any information pertaining to oneself by avoiding sending any photograph online particularly to strangers or chat friends as the have been incidents of misuse of the photographs. Never send your credit card number to any site that unsecured, to guard against fraud. It is always happen especially asking to be a premium member to be a member beforehand before pursuing doing any action such as downloading or uploading items. If the site seems untrusted, immediately close the page so that it may prevent from a virus to attack. Therefore, always use the latest and updated antivirus software to guard against virus attacks. Parents especially must be always keep on eye on the sites that their children accessed to prevent any kind of harassment in children. It is better to uses a security program that gives control over the cookies and send information back to the site as leaving the cookies unprotected. Website owners should watch traffics and check any irregularity on the site. Web servers running public sites must be physically separate protected from internal corporate network. As internet use continues to rise across the globe, maintaining an adequate number of cyber professional is essential to keep pace with this growth and improving the cyber security in Malaysia. People or end users of the internet or computer should be educate and aware of the cyber crimes in Malaysia by deleting histories, cache, cookies, and saved passwords mainly if the users using the internet or the computers in the cyber caf. Some advise from the experts are no to sharing personal information online, filling out profiles on websites, or using gender specific or provocative screen names or e-mail addresses. This may help users from any kind of harassment or phishing the users privacy. Though the user having a family or any sort of relationship, say no to sharing password because the user privacy can be leaked due to clumsiness of giving away the password just because they are the users people. So it is convenient to set up a special email address for cyber contact, thus, saving all communications in the computers so it became a handy to recognize strangers or not. Briefly, cyber securities in Malaysia still need to be improved in order to prevent or reduce cyber crimes in Malaysia. The user should be aware of the cyber crime by preventing them to happen. Furthermore, all related agencies should call for alliance in order to prevent and reduce the numbers of cyber crimes in this country.
2666 words

REFERENCES
Js

ENGLISH FOR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION (OUMH1203)

1. http://scamfraudalert.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/fbi-2010-cybercrime-statistics/ 2. http://www.naavi.org/pati/pati_cybercrimes_dec03.htm 3. http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/02257/more.html 4. http://www.reportcybercrime.com/classification.php

Js