The word cyber and its relative dot.com are probably the most commonly used terminologies of the modern era. In the information age the rapid development of computers, telecommunications and other technologies has led to the evolution of new forms of trans-national crimes known as cyber crimes. Cyber crimes have virtually no boundaries and may affect every country in the world. They may be defined as any crime with the help of computer and telecommunication technology, with the purpose of influencing the functioning of computer or the computer systems. The extent of loss involved worldwide of cyber crimes is tremendous as it is estimated that about 500 million people who use the Internet can be affected by the emergence of cyber crimes. Cyber crimes are a very serious threat for the times to come and pose one of the most difficult challenges before the law enforcement machinery Most cyber crimes do not involve violence but rather greed, pride, or play on some character weakness of the victims. It is difficult to identify the culprit, as the Net can be a vicious web of deceit and can be accessed from any part of the globe. For these reasons, cyber crimes are considered.

Hacking

It is the most common type of Cyber crime being committed across the world. Hacking has been defined in section 66 of The Information Technology Act, 2000 as follows "whoever with the intent to cause or knowing that he is likely to cause wrongful loss or damage to the public or any person destroys or deletes or alters any information residing in a computer resource or
diminishes its value or utility or affects it injuriously by any means commits hacking".

Security Related Crimes

With the growth of the internet, network security has become a major concern. Private confidential information has become available to the public. Confidential information can reside in two states on the network. It can reside on the physical stored media, such as hard drive or memory or it can reside in the transit across the physical network wire in the form of packets. These two information states provide opportunities for attacks from users on the internal network, as well as users on the Internet.

• Network Packet Sniffers
• IP Spoofing
• Password attacks
• Distribution of sensitive internal information to external sources:
• Man-in-the-middle-attacks

Alteration And Destruction Of Digital Information

The corruption and destruction of digital information is the single largest menace facing the world of computers. This is introduced by a human agent with the help of various programmes which have been described in detail below as follows: Virus Just as a virus can infect the human immunity system there exist programs, which, can destroy or hamper computer systems. A computer virus is a programme designed to replicate and spread, generally with the victim being oblivious to its existence. Computer viruses spread by attaching themselves to programmes like word processor or spreadsheets or they attach themselves to the boot sector of a disk. When an infected file is activated or when the computer is started from an infected disk, the virus itself is also executed.

Pornography On The Net

The growth of technology has flip side to it causing multiple problems in everyday life. Internet has provided a medium for the facilitation of crimes like pornography. Cyber porn as it is popularly called is widespread. Almost 50% of the web sites exhibit pornographic material on the Internet today. Pornographic materials can be reproduced more quickly and cheaply on new media like hard disks, floppy discs and CD-Roms. The new technology is not merely an extension of the existing forms like text, photographs and images. Apart from still pictures and images, full motion video clips and complete movies are also available. Another great disadvantage with a media like this is its easy availability and accessibility to children who can now log on to pornographic web-sites from their own houses in relative anonymity and the social and legal deterrents associated with physically purchasing an adult magazine from the stand are no longer present. Furthermore, there are more serious offences which have universal disapproval like child pornography and far easier for offenders to hide and propagate through the medium of the internet.