Cyber Crime

Cyber crime is a serious crime in Singapore, and the fastest crime growing in the world. Hackers in Singapore can be jailed for up to three years or fined up to S$10,000. Cyber crime is a threat for Singapore because terrorists who plan to attack a country could send a carefully engineered packet of data into the computer systems which control the network for essential services. This would threathen the safety of the people in Singapore. Cyber crime in Singapore has raised from 10 in 2000 to 19 in 2001 and 41 in 2003. Singapore has joint hands with various Asia countries to combat cyber crime by having seminars to exchange informations on Internet security. The examples of cyber crime are

• computer or network is a tool of the criminal activity include spamming and criminal copyright crimes, particularly those facilitated through peer-to-peer networks.
• computer or network is a target of criminal activity include unauthorized access (i.e, defeating access controls), malicious code, and denial-of-service attacks.
• computer or network is a place of criminal activity include theft of service (in particular, telecom fraud) and certain financial frauds
• traditional crimes facilitated through the use of computers or networks include Nigerian money fraud or other gullibility or social engineering frauds (e.g., hacking "phishing", identity theft, child pornography, online gambling, securities fraud, etc.).
• Cyberstalking is a traditional crime (harassment) that has taken a new form when facilitated through computer networks.

The cyber crime article relating to Singapore that I found is email bombing. This article is about a Singaporean guy who has sent 75000 emails to goverment agency. The message was sent to 3 computer server of the Housing and Development Board (HDB). I find that this crime may be minor to some people, but it is a serious crime in the law of the eyes.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercrime

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/asia-pacific/751817.stm

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/11/11/singapore.internet.reut/