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Digital Crime and Terrorism
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Digital Crime and Terrorism
Digital crime refers to illegal activities that use computers as a main source of payment. It also includes the use of a computer to store evidence of various samples. Digital crime is mostly linked to selfish desires which are different from digital terrorism. It includes spyware, bullying, stealing of identity and digital fraud. Hadler and Jaishankair (2012), define digital crime as offences that are committed against individuals or groups of individuals with a criminal motive to intentionally harm the reputation of the victim or cause physical or mental harm, or loss, to the victim directly or indirectly, using modern telecommunication networks such as Internet.
An example of a digital crime is a hacker hacking into financial banks and transferring the money into their personal account. This can be termed as a digital crime because the person takes the money for personal gain.
Digital terrorism is the use of the internet or computer to conduct malicious or violent acts that may lead to death or bodily harm of an individual in order to have economic, social but mostly political gain through the intimidating the victim. Digital terrorist mostly uses malicious software like computer viruses and worms. Other methods include scripting of programmes and hardware interference. It is also referred to the disruption of information systems by the terrorist in order to create havoc and panic to the victims. These terror activities take three forms which are; the simple unstructured, advanced and structured and the complex and coordinated terror attacks.
Impacts of Information Technology in Fighting Digital Crimes
Technology has created opportunities for many people in the world including making the world a globe in which people can interact and meet or visit each other. The same technology has brought negative impacts to the society. For example, it has led to increased crime in most countries and it has also led to lazy people who rely on technology to do their chores.
Technology has also contributed to fighting crime but at the same tie intensifying crime activities across the globe. According to Taylor and Taylor (2010), technology is capable of being used to attack and cause harm to the government and the public. Technology has also been used to invade the privacy of people which later leads to different crimes like identity theft.
Technological information has been used to keep the society safe from the different possible harms that may be caused by terrorist or crime doers. Police officers who are supposed to be law enforcers can easily find criminals and lawbreakers. This is because technology has enabled them to be able to track criminals using criminal trackers. A person is able to use the tracker to identify who is hacking their computers for malicious gains or terror activities hence keeping the society safe from criminal activities. This type of technology has brought justice to the society.
Technology has negative impacts on the economy. This is because it is very expensive to track down a digital terrorist or a person who conducted the crime. The cost of hiring or buying technology to use in tracking of these criminals is very costly. The technology used by these criminals is higher than that of the law enforcers. For example, one may feel the need to increase the number of computer...