In this section I am going to be talking about fighting crime in the ICT world. ICT  crime is crime involving a computer or related technology. It could be physcial theft of the computer or of components from a computer, or using one computer to attempt to gain access to another computer system and commit a crime.

 

The computer crimes that are seen in films are not usually possible in the real world. Stopping a time clock and stealing money, collecting all the fractions of money and getting them paid to you or hacking into a bank and transferring money to your account all sound easy through but are extremely rare if not impossible to achieve.

 

However, crimes involving computer do not exist. It can be inductrial espionage(finding out what a business competitor is doing), breaking into a computer system or trying to find personal data.   

 

There are two main groups of methods of combating computer crime:

• Physcial methods

• Logical methods

 

Although employees are the most likely to be the ones who cause damage or loss to data, a business has to be mindful about the risks from other people outside the business.

 

Hackers

A hacker is a person who breaks codes and passwords to gain unauthorised entry to computer systems. Many hackers often don't intend to cause damage to data but just enjoy the challenge of breaking into a system. However, in some instances the hacker's purpose could be to commit fraud, to steal commercially valuable data and sell it to another company or to damage or delete the data in order to harm the company. 

 

Viruses

A computer virus is a computer program that is designed to copy itself repeatedly and attach itself to other computer programs. In the early days of personal computing (1980's) some of the people who created them did it as a 'joke'. For example, there was a virus that caused all the characters on screen to drop into a heap at the bottom of the display. Very annoying but relatively harmless. However, quite soon some really nasty versions came out that were deliberately designed to corrupt and delete your files as well as trying to copy itself everywhere. Viruses can cause an immense amount of time wasting and financial loss for people and businesses.