Download - Foreign Military Studies Office - U.S. Army

into the system. Copyrighted music was and still is available for download. The
biggest site, Napster, was forced to shut down its use of copyrighted music but
can still make available noncopyrighted music. Digital videos are the latest
victim. During a computer security assessment at a US government agency, an
FTP site that was hacked was found to contain digital videos that had not been
publicly released on DVD yet.
(7) Virus Creation and Distribution
This type of crime fits many of the above categories. A virus can have
many purposes, such as the destruction of data for sabotage reasons, the
collection of data for intelligence purposes, network slowdowns for information
warfare purposes, and so on. A virus is built to spread itself to other computers
via several means, to include “Sneakernet”, the manual transport of a diskette,
or a worm that propagates itself in some fashion across the network. Most
viruses are attachments to emails that are executed by the user. However,
today’s viruses are becoming even more lethal. They can be part of a website
script, or they can be automatically executed by the function of the mail
program. Destruction of data may occur or information may be intercepted and
sent via email to other locations (data such as the password file). Some worms
or viruses attack other systems until the network is clogged to a stand still.
Others infect a system but then wait until a certain date to carry out their
destructive task, such as wiping out all of the contents of the user’s hard drive.
These latter viruses are called “logic bombs,” but the payload may be
considered a virus.
Formatted: Bullets
Other Criminal Uses of the Computer
Computers help criminals by providing them tools available either
commercially or on the Internet. These include deceptive messages, fake return
addresses, encryption, and even steganography tools to hide communications.
Deception can include disguising a site as a place to send money for a
charitable cause, when, in fact, the money goes into a private account.
Encryption is the method of encoding a file with a key to produce a scrambled
document. The receiver of the encrypted message must have a key to decode
the message. Steganography is the art of hiding or embedding a document or
other file within another “carrier” file. Most standard steganography programs
have the ability to encrypt the document first and then embed it in a carrier file
such as a web graphic file or audio file. This presents two levels of difficulty in
finding these illicit communications: first detection and extraction of the
embedded file, and then the decryption of the encrypted document. Of course,
law enforcement can benefit from the use of these tools as well.
Another communication device used by criminals is IRC. This is an
Internet tool that indicates who is online at any time and enables you to contact
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