Author Name:   nikhilb09

Cyber Crime – Issue threats and management is a masterwork by Atul Jain. Atul Jain has been a brilliant student in engineering from Delhi and Nagpur Universities. His two volume work deals with a variety of subjects related to Cyber Crime...

Cyber Crime - Issues Threats and Management

Book Review
Cyber Crime – Issue threats and management is a masterwork by Atul Jain. Atul Jain has been a brilliant student in engineering from Delhi and Nagpur Universities. His two volume work deals with a variety of subjects related to Cyber Crime. In volume 1, he speaks of subjects like nature, tactics, chronologies, consequences of cyber crime, global effort to combat cyber crime etc. This book offers a persuasive study of the damaging potential of cyber attacks on almost all aspects of human endeavor. It also describes the actions that need to be taken to control the threats from cyber attacks.

In volume 1 named ‘Managing Cyber crime to Cyber warfare’ the author commence his 1st chapter ‘Nature and Consequences of Cyber Crime’ by explaining about what is crime and has been in the past and then relates to the world of internet that how Cyber crime has emerged as a new field in the crime. He states that though computers and internet have created phenomenal possibilities to undertake many human problems, but they have a dark side in the sense that they are the cause of cyber crimes and raises issues relating to time period, jurisdiction, privacy and anonymity. Cybercrime presents before the nations of the world a concern by many international organizations, the most important being the problems relating to the law enforcement and encounters in applying the existing law. The author, in depth, talks of range of cybercrime activities covering scenarios like hacking, fraud, gambling, child pornography, cyber terrorism etc.

Now the author describes about the tactics and various offences relating to cyber crime. The author has categorized cyber offences into four types which are network-related, data-related, access-related and computer-related and elaborates about each of them. Offences related to e-mails are very frequent in today’s times and the author has also thrown light on this issue which bears contemporary significance. It is commendable to note that the author has described the each and every aspect of the various offences thoroughly. The author further mentions about the problem in recording the statistics of the cyber crime as well as difficult to quantify the loss of access or services to users and consequent damage, the loss of valuable data and the loss of revenue from site operations and lack of technical knowledge in the society regarding cyber crime. Further problems arise with mass victimization caused by offences such as virus propagation, because the numbers of victims are simply too large to identify and count, and because such programs can continue creating victims long after the offenders have been caught and punished.

In his chapter ‘Chronology of Cyber crimes’ the author has dealt with the history of cybercrimes with significant real life examples of cybercrimes starting from the 1960s and continuing till 2001 and so on. This helps the reader in getting a fine idea about the emerging trend of cybercrimes that have been taking place in the world .Some of the brilliant examples given by the author in his book include the Melissa virus which took advantage of a flaw in the widely used document designing software Microsoft Word and damaged computers and the computer virus named ‘I love you’ which spread in the year 2000 affecting thousands of corporate websites causing companies to shut down their email systems to stop its spread.

The author emphasizes on the cyber terrorism, its impact which goes deeper into the economic and social fabric of our life. He believes that humans shall continue to enjoy the benefits of the internet but at the same time they need to be aware of the dangers and pervasive drawback of cyber crime. The author’s view that cyber crimes are inevitable indeed appears to be true considering the chronological examples of cyber crimes stated in this very book that have been occurring since long ago. According to the author, there is need to protect important information from being leaked. Dealing with cyber crimes is much more compound than before because in the networked world, the new generation of vandals and data thugs does not need to have physical contact with the victim. Providing security against cyber-crimes must be balanced so as not to cause inconvenience to the user as the author says with the reasoning that human nature is such that people will look for shortcuts to complex the processes.

Providing much of information about guidelines to safe computing, the author has dealt with privacy issues including that related to e-mails and has elaborately talked about the measures to protect the computer systems against cyber crimes. The saying that ‘prevention is better than cure’ being true still does not apply to cases where the harm has somehow been done and the question to be answered in such a case is ‘what is to be done next to deal with the problematic situation? ’. In this book though, the author has not only talked of the prevention but has also dealt with the aspect of the aftermath by stating techniques and plans to respond to a security incident in different scenarios that commonly occur when cybercrimes are used to target organizations. The author has dedicated many pages of his book on the chapter dealing with cyber security and this fact not only highlights the importance of the topic of cyber security dealt by the author but also is an evidence of the author’s sincere effort in trying to make the reader understand the importance of cyber security.

The author has stated that to fight cybercrime, proper legislation would have to lie in two distinct areas- national legislation to cover issues of internal responsibility and liability, and international legislation relating the inter-state aspects of jurisdiction, ownership, responsibility and liability and has elaborated on both of the categories. The account given by the author not only gives knowledge to the reader about global efforts against cybercrime but also helps in understanding as to what difficulties are being faced by the nations of the world in fighting cyber-crime, what is the reason for such difficulties and upto what extent has the effort to combat cyber crime been a success.

The author, in the last chapter of this book, has talked about managing cyber crime where he has stated the recommendations given by the Information Security Permanent Monitoring Panel that was established in 2001 in the framework of Planetary Emergencies. In September 2002, these recommendations had been submitted to the Secretary General of the UN, the President of the General Assembly and the Presidents of the relevant Main committees. The author hereby has raised important questions such as ‘Why should the UN have the Leading Role in intergovernmental activities on Cyberspace?’, ‘Why a law of Cyberspace?’ and ‘How comprehensive a consensus is needed?’ and has ornately discussed on each of them.

This book attempts to provide a greater understanding and awareness of the world of information insecurity and the impending natures of cyber-threats through the identification of the problem, potential solutions, and the development of an action plan. The book attempts to highlight the techniques that cyber-criminals are likely to use as their primary means of communication in the current state of the technology, such as untraceable emails, encryption, and digital compression.

This book is a useful and an interesting book to read for people who want to gather in-depth knowledge about cyber crime as it gives a good idea of what cybercrime is, how is cybercrime different from ordinary crimes, why is cybercrime difficult to tackle, what tactics do cyber offenders use, what are the consequences of cybercrime, what has been done by the world’s nations to tackle cybercrime, what are the cyber crime laws around the world and throws light on several other relevant aspects.

Though, this book is interesting and is written in easy language, however, at some places, a reader who is a ‘complete’ layman in terms of computers and other related technology having no knowledge about the same may find this book complex because of the use of technical terms.

Book: Cyber Crime- Issue Threats and Management: Volume 1-‘Managing Cyber Crime to Cyber Warfare’
Author: Mr. Atul Jain
Publisher: Isha Books, Delhi.
Edition: 2005
ISBN No.: 81-8205-107-X

The  author can be reached at: nikhilborana@legalserviceindia.com

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