Activity 1. What is cybercrime? Have you ever come across any?
Computer crime is a criminal activity involving the use of information technology to gain an illegal or an unauthorized access to a computer system with intent of damaging, deleting or altering computer data. People who commit crimes using computers are often called computer hackers or crackers. In the computer industry, hackers are known as white hats and crackers are called black hats or dark side hackers. White Hat hackers are those people who attempt to hack into, or break into, computers and computer programs with the intent of finding things that are wrong and fixing them to help the computer owner. Black Hat hackers are those people who break into computer systems with malicious intent – usually to steal or vandalize.
1. unauthorized use of a computer, which might involve stealing a username and password (e.g. piracy, scam, phishing);
2. creating or releasing a malicious computer program (e.g. computer virus, worm, Trojan Horse);
3. harassment and cyberstalking.