by Police - Bureau of Police Research and Development

The Indian Police JournalCourts/Jury and periodic training programme to update their skillsand knowledge. It has become inevitable for Law enforcement tounderstand the implication of Cyber Crimes and needs a structured/formalized approach in Cyber Crime investigation.Emerging Characteristics of Cyber CrimePrimary objective of a cyber criminal is to target the informationthat is an asset to any organization. Crimes are categorized based onmalicious intention caused by motivation. Motivation falls into fourcategories. Motivation may be due to greed, challenge and maliciousintent. A comprehensive discussion of criminal intention is beyondthe scope of this paper. Based on the value of the information asset,different forms of Cyber Crimes are being committed. These include:cyber-fraud, identity theft, cyber-bullying, denial of service, childpornography. The means through which these crimes are committedare by crimeware. Crimeware may be a virus, worm, Trojan, keylogger, malicious code and the like. Considering the forms and meansthrough which these attacks are targeted, the main objective falls intothree categories:• Collection of information;• Distribution/dissemination of the information collected thereof;and• Use the information to perform further attacks.The magnitude and impact of such targets becomes apparent.Understanding these objectives and underlying technology involvedif the type of attack exhibits polymorphism causing coordinated attacks collecting the evidence, consideration must be given to electronicevidence that is scattered globally.Exploitation TacticsCyber criminals operate to target information assets available innetworked environment to cause extensive combination of attacksthrough covert channels. The attacks are caused by vectors : a98 January - March, 2013