What is Cyber Crime?

Cyber Crime: The term cyber crime is a misnomer. This term has nowhere been defined in any statue/ Act passed or enacted by the Indian Parliament. The concept of cyber crime is not radically different from the concept of conventional crime. Both include conduct whether act or omission, which cause breach of rules of law and counterbalanced by the sanction of the state.

                Before evaluating the concept of cyber crime it is obvious that the concept of conventional crime be discussed and the points of similarity and deviance between both these forms may be discussed.

                Cyber Crime is the latest and perhaps the most complicated problem in the cyber world. “Cyber Crime may be said to be those species, of which, genus is the conventional crime, and where either the computer is an object or subject of the conduct constituting crime”. “Any criminal activity that uses a computer either as an instrumentality, 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, e-mail spoofing, forgery, cyber defamation, cyber stalking. The computer may however the target for unlawful acts in the following cases- unauthorized access to computer/computer system/computer networks, theft of information contained in the electronic form, e-mail bombing, data diddling, salami attacks, logic bombs, Trojan attacks, Internet time thefts, web jacking, physically damaging the computer system.

Conclusion: Capacity of human mind is unfathomable. It is not possible to eliminate cyber crime from cyber space. It is quite possible to check them. History is the witness that no legislation has succeeded in totally eliminating crime from the globe. The only possible step is to make people aware of their rights and duties and further making the application of the laws more stringent to check crime. Undoubtedly the Act is historical step in the cyber world. Further I all together do not deny that there is a need to bring changes in the Information Technology Act to make it more effective to combat cyber crime. I would conclude with a word of caution for the pro-legislation school that it should be kept in mind that the provisions of the cyber law are not made so stringent that it may retard the growth of the industry and prove to be counter-productive.