Introduction
The initial occurrence of cybercrime was committed before the Internet came into existence involving data theft (James, 2009). The first significant wave of cybercrime went with the spread of email during the late 80’s. The next wave in the cybercrime history timeline of the 90’s went with the advancement of web browsers being vulnerable to viruses (James, 2009). Cybercrime began to take off in the early 2,000’s when social media came to life. Consequently, creating a flood of personal information and the rise of ID theft. The latest wave is the establishment of a global criminal industry such as Human trafficking (James, 2009).
The Early Days of Computer Crime
In the 1960s a frequency of 2600 Hz would interact with AT&T's implementation of fully automatic switches, inadvertently opening the door for phreaking (Price, 2008). Various Phreaking boxes are used to communicate with automated telephone systems.
The term phreaks referred to groups of individuals who used reverse engineering on the system of tones to route long-distance calls (Price, 2008). By re-creating these sounds, phreaks switch calls from the phone handset, allowing free calls to be made anywhere in the world. The luxury in the creation of these tones came electronic tone generators known as blue boxes. A staple of the phreaker community, including future Apple Inc. in the 1990’s cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
During the late 1990s, the fraudulent aspect of phreaking almost vanished (Price, 2008). Amid the much higher risk of being caught with the advances in technology, toll fraud started to become a concept associated very little with phreaking.
Organized Crime
During 1999 is the banner year for software security and hacking. A hacker interviewed by Hilly Rose during the Art Bell Coast-to-Coast Radio Show exposes a plot by Al-Qaida to derail Amtrak trains. Resulting in all trains being forcibly stopped over Y2K as a safety measure (Revolvy, 2014).
In 2003, the hacktivist group Anonymous was formed, though nonviolent, most acts of hacktivism are illegal. Anonymous gained an unsavory international reputation in 2008 for a months-long campaign against the Church of Scientology called "Project Chanology." The hackers crashed the church's websites and flooded their fax machines with black faxes using up their printer ink (Wolchover, 2011). Project Chanology was Anonymous' rebuttal to an effort by Scientologists to use Internet censorship to spread misinformation about their practices (Wolchover, 2011).
In 2010, during the Arab Spring civil wars in North Africa and the Middle East. Anonymous played an ongoing role in the Arab uprisings. The group orchestrated a series of illegal "denial of service" attacks against the websites governments of Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran (Wagenseil, 2011). These attacks used simple software to overwhelm a high website volume of traffic and crashing it.
Modern Attacks
In 2010, operators of Stuxnet accelerated program by adding new malware components that make it spread faster and make it more dangerous (Finkle, 2011). Stuxnet is the first computer virus intended to cause damage in the real world. Unlike other programs, Stuxnet was unique because it targeted software that controlled industrial systems and created machinery in Iran to spin out of control and self-destruct (Finkle, 2011). During 2012, Roel Schouwenberg, of Kaspersky Lab, a senior anti-virus researcher found traces of another file, called Flame and was evident in the early iterations of Stuxnet (Kushner, 2013).
The Flame was a precursor to Stuxnet that had gone undetected and 40 times as big as Stuxnet. While Stuxnet was meant to destroy things, Flame’s purpose was to spy on people. Currently, once Flame had compromised a machine, it could stealthily search for keywords on highly-classified PDF files, then make and transmit a summary of the document without being detected (Kushner, 2013).
Digital Evidence
Digital Evidence is data that users have hidden, deleted or stored on, received or transmitted by an electronic device. The digital data recovered is used as evidence in civil, criminal, or administrative cases. (Nelson, 2015).
Hacking
The media define hacking and its legality that paints hackers as criminals who corrupts computer and network activity (Bachmann, 2008). Also, they portray hackers gaining access to illegal devices and operating systems. Enforcement defines hacking, and its legality focuses on the illicit activity and them gaining access to a network without permission which is known as an intrusion (Bachmann, 2008).
Once Congress enacted the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, also known as the CFAA. The federal anti-hacking statute prohibited illegal access to computers and networks and was decreed to existing criminal laws about growing concerns of computer crimes (Zetter, 2014). The law went into effect in 1986, in time to be used to convict Robert Morris, Jr., the son of an NSA computer security worker, who unleashed the world's first computer worm in 1988 (Zetter, 2014).
Conclusion
As hackers sell their services to the highest bidder, hacking becomes big business. A cybercriminal is individuals who commit cybercrimes, and they make use of the computer whichever means as a tool, a target or as both (Techopedia, 2018). Cybercriminals frequently work in organized groups.