| itself. Forensics—the process, means, and methods for collecting crime evidence—can be said to date back to the 18th century stemming from forensic medicine and studies of anatomy and fingerprints. Crime manifests itself in various ways and forms and digital crime is the newest one. As the essence of the various forms of crime has remained unaltered throughout the passage of time, it is safe to assume that digital crime will exhibit this property too and it is this “permanence” factor that makes imperative for organizations and individuals to understand the issues and complexities that arise.
In 2003, 82% of American companies surveyed by the Computer Security Institute, faced security problems and dealt with damages that were estimated at $27.3 million. And even though organizations already spend considerable amounts of money on safeguarding their information assets, according to surveys published by monitoring organizations such as the Computer Crime Research Centre in the U.S. (March 2004) there will be an increase in the information security market because of cyber criminality growth.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines “computer crime” as “any illegal, unethical, or unauthorized behavior relating to the automatic processing and the transmission of data”. A common categorization of computer crime is by dividing it to computer crimes and computer related crimes (Handbook of Legislative Procedures of Computer and Network Misuse in EU Countries, 2002). Computer crimes encompass all offences against the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer data and systems such as illegal access to computer systems or malicious code writing. Computer-related crimes are “traditional crimes that can be, or have been, committed utilizing other means of perpetration which are now being, or are capable of being, executed via the Internet, computer-related venue (e-mail, newsgroups, internal networks) or other technological computing advancement. Examples are intellectual property rights infringement (e.g., software piracy) and payment system frauds (e.g., credit card fraud via the Internet). |
