Fundamentals of Information Systems Security, 4th Edition

Overview of Computer Crime

Many people talk of computer crime as if it were a completely different way to carry out crime. The reality is that computer crime is just regular old crime with a few new tools. In fact, most “regular” crime today involves computers at some level. The term computer crime typically refers to crimes that target computer resources, either data that computers store or the services they provide (or both). Most computer criminals, whom we generally call attackers, want to disrupt normal operations or steal valuable data, and, in some cases, they want to do both. One of the first activities of a forensic analyst is to determine the type of computer crime that has been carried out, an often difficult task because the motive ...