What is Cyber Criminal

Cyber Crime Introduction:  

A cyber crime inevitably engages a computing device and a network where the computer can be used as the weapon of the crime or it can be the target as well. As a definition of crime, “Offences that are committed against individuals or groups of individuals with a criminal motive to intentionally harm the reputation of the victim or cause physical or mental harm, or loss, to the victim directly or indirectly, using modern telecommunication networks such as Internet (networks including but not limited to Chat rooms, emails, notice boards and groups) and mobile phones (Bluetooth/ SMS/ MMS)."  It also endangers the national security along with the personal. Issues like hacking, unwarranted mass-surveillance, copyright infringement, child pornography have become the raving problems in the sphere. Also a violation of woman’s dignity through cyber space has stroked a higher rate than ever.

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Cyber Criminal Definition

A cyber criminal is an individual entity who takes advantage of a computer and network system or makes it a target or sometimes both in order to commit cyber crime.

There are generally three ways that a cyber criminal works-

• The criminal targets a computer system for malicious activities like data theft, identity theft, virus spread and so on.

• The criminal owns a personal computer to commit crimes like fraudulent activities, spamming and many more.

• The criminal saves the crime documents like illegal data and in the computer and uses it as an accessory.

Cyber Criminal Groups

Criminals often work in groups as much like any other crime scenes. For cyber based crimes it sometimes needs a group of people who can work as the followings-

• Programmers who can write coded programs for the organization s/he is working.

• Distributors who can sell and distribute stolen data, information or goods that has been collected from associated cybercriminals.

• IT experts who basically maintain the organization’s IT infrastructure, servers and database.

• Hackers who can track and massacre networks or systems.

• Fraudsters to make plots for phishing and spamming.

• System providers who hosts malicious and illegal sites.

• Cashiers who provide names and account details to criminals and manage the drop accounts.

• Money mules that manage the bank accounts and keep eye on the wire transfers.

• Tellers that launders with illegal money via digital and foreign exchange methods.

• And lastly leaders who are in connection with the criminal organizations. They generally lack in technical knowledge and send teams to do a task.

Penalties for Cyber crime

According to IPC section 43 of ‘Information technology Act, 2000’, whoever deletes or destroys or alters or causes disruption of any computer with the intention of damaging the whole data of the computer system without permission from the owner shall be liable to pay fine upto 1 crore to the person affected. Also according to section 43a of ‘Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008’, if a body corporate is liable for maintaining the protection for a person’s data and is accused of negligence of the same or failure in protection, the body corporate is accountable to pay compensation to the affected. According to section 66 that deals with hacking enables a criminal with 3 years of imprisonment or fine. There are other penalties as well for different kind of cyber crimes. 

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