Criminal Justice Responses to Cybercrime in All Its Forms

UNDOC

 

I.- Introduction to the Problem

Over the past few decades, an entirely new form of criminality emerged called “cyber-crime”.  One of the first known hackers was named “Captain Crunch”. Captain Crunch was involved in “phone phreaking” this meant he would trick the phone lines by using a whistle to get free calling.  One of the first hackers to ever get caught was Kevin Mitnick, who started breaking into computer networks as a teenager in the late ’70s and by the late 1980s had been involved in a prolific hacking career.

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The more prominent situation arose in the fact that international borders mattered very little to cyber criminals and it was often as easy for them to attack a target on the other side of the world as it was to hit one on the other side of the street. The globalization of cybercrime meant that law enforcement had to not only identify who the hackers were but also had to find a way of bringing them down either by seeking extradition or providing information to the authorities in the attacker’s home country to be able to prosecute there.

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II.- International incidents

An issue in pursuing international cybercriminals is that you can only extradite someone from a country you have an extradition treaty with. Once a suspect is identified, authorities will often wait until they travel to a country they can extradite from and request their arrest.  Otherwise, you can’t do anything about it. One of the examples of this was Aleksandr Panin, aka “Gribodemon”, the brains behind the SpyEye financial Trojan. In 2009, he sold it to other cybercriminals online who used it to target more than one million banking customers. Being that he was based in the Russian city of Tver, Panin may have thought he was beyond the reach of US authorities.  However, in 2013 the opportunity for law enforcement came just over a year later. First Bendelladj was arrested in Bangkok airport, while he was in transit between Malaysia and Algeria.

 

III.- Solving this International Issue

Takedowns not involving arrests are sometimes criticized as being ineffective, but this is often far from the case.  Just under four years ago, the FBI, the UK’s National Crime Agency, a number of other police forces, along with cybersecurity companies including Symantec teamed up to tackle the financial Trojan of “Game Over ZEUS”  which, at the time, was one of the most prolific and dangerous financial online threats. Gameover Zeus at its height had hundreds of thousands of computers in its sway. It was difficult to disrupt because it didn’t have any centralized infrastructure and instead used a peer-to-peer network (hard to trace)and domain generation algorithm (DGA) for (C&C) purposes. This time around, key nodes on the peer network were disabled by law enforcement, along with the domains generated by the DGA. One of Symantec’s contributions to the operation was to release a new tool that bypassed countermeasures and removed the malware, along with the additional Gameover Zeus components.

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IV.- Potential Impact of Cyber Crime

According to the World Economic Forum, $445 billion global economies is lost to cybercrime annually.

 

VI.- Further Questions to think about

1. How does my country’s economy rely on this method?

2. How is my country helping to solve this problem?

3. Is my country giving enough resources to eradicate this? Or is it economically unavailable?

   1. What is another way my country can help?

4. How is this problem affecting my country? Economically?

5. If my country is not affected by this problem, will it still help to solve it?

 

VII.- Works Cited

https://equiniti.com/us/news-and-views/eq-views/cybercrime/

 

https://medium.com/threat-intel/cyber-crime-takedowns-66915be7307e

 

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1902073,00.html