Computer Fraud And Crimes :: essays research papers fc

Computer Fraud and Crimes In the world of computers, computer fraud and computer crime are very prevalent issues facing every computer user. This ranges from system administrators to personal computer users who do work in the office or at home. Computers without any means of security are vulnerable to attacks from viruses, worms, and illegal computer hackers. If the proper steps are not taken, safe computing may become a thing of the past. Many security measures are being implemented to protect against illegalities. Companies are becoming more aware and threatened by the fact that their computers are prone to attack. Virus scanners are becoming necessities on all machines. Installing and monitoring these virus scanners takes many man hours and a lot of money for site licenses. Many server programs are coming equipped with a program called "netlog." This is a program that monitors the computer use of the employees in a company on the network. The program monitors memory and file usage. A qualified system administrator should be able to tell by the amounts of memory being used and the file usage if something is going on that should not be. If a virus is found, system administrators can pinpoint the user who put the virus into the network and investigate whether or not there was any malice intended. One computer application that is becoming more widely used and, therefore, more widely abused, is the use of electronic mail or email. In the present day, illegal hackers can read email going through a server fairly easily. Email consists of not only personal transactions, but business and financial transactions. There are not many encryption procedures out for email yet. As Gates describes, soon email encryption will become a regular addition to email just as a hard disk drive has become a regular addition to a computer (Gates p.97-98). Encrypting email can be done with two prime numbers used as keys. The public key will be listed on the Internet or in an email message. The second key will be private, which only the user will have. The sender will encrypt the message with the public key, send it to the recipient, who will then decipher it again with his or her private key. This method is not foolproof, but it is not easy to unlock either. The numbers being used will probably be over 60 digits in length (Gates p.98-99). The Internet also poses more problems to users. This problem faces the home user more than the business user. When a person logs onto the Internet, he or she may download a file corrupted with a virus.