Crime in the Cyber Realm

784 Words2 Pages

The following report takes into consideration two recent cybercrimes for the purpose of analyzing what cybercrime is and who is responsible for it. The opinions of Joseph Migga Kizza and Lawrence Lessig will be evaluated as they relate to the two cybercrimes. As part of the analysis, the underlying assumptions and the practical implications of the two authors will be considered.
Two Recent Cybercrimes
With the popularity of the social media site Twitter, single letter handles are rare. Naoki Hiroshima was the owner of one of those rare handles, @N. He had been offered as much as fifty thousand dollars for the account, which he always declined. On January 20th of 2014, a hacker was able to social engineer part of Naoki’s credit card information from a PayPal representative. The hacker used that information to social engineer a GoDaddy representative into giving him control of Naoki’s domain. The domain was then used as a bargaining piece to force Naoki to trade the Twitter account for the domain (Naoki Hiroshima, 2014). The Twitter account had been the hacker’s target from the beginning.
In a separate case of cybercrime, on July 29th 2011, the hacktivist group Anonymous breached the network of the defense contractor ManTech and stole information from their servers. ManTech provides network security services for the FBI for 99.5 million dollars over a five year contract. The breach was announced by Anonymous via Twitter, and was stated to be in retaliation for the arrest of some of its members, nine days earlier for their participation in a denial of service attack against PayPal (Fahmida Rashid. 2011).
Cybercrime Theories and Analysis
Joseph Migga Kizza takes the position that there are two components to cybercrime; technica...

... middle of paper ...

...ion of ethical/moral norms might not be very practical given the global scope of the Internet and those that use it.

References
Hiroshima, N. (2014). My $50,000 Twitter Username Was Stolen Thanks to PayPal and GoDaddy. Retrieved January 30, 2014 from https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd
Kizza, J. (2011). Computer network security and cyber ethics. (3rd ed.). Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc.
Lessig, L. (2006). Code: Version 2.0. (2nd ed.). Ney York: Basic Books.
Rashid, F. (2011). Anonymous Claims Network Breach of FBI Security Contractor ManTech. Retrieved February 1, 2014 from http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Anonymous-Claims-Network-Breach-of-FBI-Security-Contractor-ManTech-693504/
Wiseman, P. (n.d.). Cracking the 'Great Firewall' of China's Web censorship. Retrieved February 9, 2014 from http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4707107&page=1&singlePage=true

More about Crime in the Cyber Realm

Open Document