CYBER CRIME

what is cyber-crime?
Any criminal activity that uses a computer either as an instrument, target or a means for perpetuating further crimes comes within the ambit of cyber crime. A generalized definition of cyber crime may be "unlawful acts, wherein the computer is either a tool or target or both".
The computer may be used as a tool in the following kinds of activity-financial crimes, sale of illegal articles, pornography, online gambling, intellectual property crime, email spoofing, forgery, cyber defamation, harassment, cyber stalking (following a person's movement through the Internet).
The computer may, however, be target for unlawful acts in the following cases - unauthorized access to the computer, computer system, computer networks, theft of information contained in the electronic form, email bombing, Trojan attacks, Internet time thefts, theft of computer system, physically damaging the computer system.
Cyber crimes could be directed against individuals (in person or property), organizations (government or firms) or the society at large.

What is cyber-terrorism?
Cyber-terrorism is the convergence of terrorism and cyberspace. It is generally understood to mean unlawful attacks and threats of attack against Computers, networks, and the information stored therein when done to intimidate or coerce a government or its people in the furtherance of political or social objectives.
Further, to qualify as cyber terrorism, an attack should result in violence against persons or property, or at least cause enough harm to generate fear. Serious attacks against critical infrastructure could be acts of cyber terrorism, depending on their impact. Attacks that disrupt non-essential services or that are mainly a costly nuisance would not.

How is an email traced?
Emails are one of the most common tools to carry out a crime. In the recent Parliament bomb scare, an email was used to convey the threat. So, email tracking is one of the most common duties of cyber crime investigators. The investigator needs to look at each point through which the email passed, working step by step back to the originating computer, and, eventually, the perpetrator. Forensic email tracing relies on computer logs. A computer log is a record of each email message that passes through a computer in a network and provides an audit trail of every machine an e-mail has passed through.
Any computer on a network has an Internet protocol address (the virtual equivalent of a street address). For evidence purposes, an investigator needs to prove that a certain email originating address traveled through a machine by verifying the message ID on a log of email transactions together with the date and time the address was recorded.
If an email is not faked, it becomes a matter of determining who used the machine at the time the suspect message was sent.
More sophisticated suspects will fake their emails, however. There are several ways of faking email, which include spoofing, remaining, relaying, spamming, stealing, and bogus accounts. Some of these use email programmers that strip the message header from the message before delivering it to the recipient or bury the message header within the email programmed.
In other cases, the "from" line in a message header is faked. Other offenders steal someone else's email account or set one up temporarily using bogus address information when they registered. Once the physical presence of the perpetrator's PC has been located, it is confiscated, and the forensic analyst makes exact copies (called image copies) of the computer's hard drives. The forensic analyst looks for file fragments or portions of any emails that contain specific references to the offending message.

Why is email tracing becoming more difficult?
There are worrisome trends that suggest email tracing will become more difficult in the future. For example, some new products coming on the market strip email headers, encrypt the message, and then destroy it after a period of time. Al-Qaida terrorists were found to be resorting to using the "dead letter box" system: someone creates an email account, gives the password to several members of a group and communicates by saving messages in a draft messages folder without sending them.
Communication by this method cannot be monitored because government systems for tracking emails work only if someone sends an email.
Smart programmers are always looking for ways to get around the audit trail, and investigators always seem to be playing catch-up when tracing email. However, email tracing is likely to remain an essential part of computer forensics.