Cybercriminality

Cybercrime is defined by the Council of Europe (Novembre 2001) as

Criminal offences committed against or with the help of computer networks.

It is a general notion. That means that cybercrime describes crimes which occur on the networks like Internet, or crimes which occur thanks to the networks or computers. To make short, cybercrime is a term used broadly to describe criminal activity in which computers or networks are a tool, a target, or a place of criminal activity.

According to wikipedia, we can find a lot of examples of cybercrimes. The most current are spamming and certain intellectual property and criminal copyright crimes, particularly those facilitated through peer-to-peer networks. It also exists financial crimes on the Internet. In this case, someone, a hacker, can steal your access codes and make transactions with your bank account. But activities like paedophilia which often occur on the Internet is a cybercrime too. So we see that there is a huge range of cybercrimes.

I found an example of cybercrime which has taken place in California in January 2006. Mr. Heim was sentenced to two years of probation and required to pay a $500 fine in addition to having to make restitution to his victim, Facility Automation Systems, in the amount of $6,050. Indeed, Mr. Heim admitted he used the username and password assigned to its former employer FAS for its Internet domain, redirected all the Internet traffic, including electronic mail, to a server at Mr. Heim’s new employer, the Moreno Valley Unified School District. Mr. Heim knew that redirecting the traffic to that server would make FAS’ web site and electronic mail services inaccessible.