Cybercrimes and Law

All what we have been talking about to prevent cybercrimes has nothing to do with the real criminals themselves!!. All this geeky technical stuff is good but cyber crimes are really very easy to commit! and very tempting!, because the punishment is not imminent. Usually, when cyber criminals are doing their attacks they have this feeling that they are safe, because they are sitting at home or at a cyber café physically way far from the "crime scene". Why is cybercrime numbers raging while physical crimes are coming to a settlement? The answer of this question cannot be answered directly. However, one can argue that usually cyber criminals do not have a visualization of what can happen to them if they were caught and usually they think that they will not get caught at all! We have to have more strict laws that define cyber crimes and its penalties. Some countries have some laws, others have few laws and others do not have laws concerning cybercrime at all! Even countries that have laws, do not spend much effort on tracking and hunting down criminals. Also trials of cyber crimes have to be more publicized. People have to know that playing around the cyberspace is not a game anymore and there are strict laws that are well applied.

The United States is taking good steps in that direction. We have John Schiefer, a botmaster, sentenced for four years prison and fined $20,000 and earlier in 2007. Also Microsoft has announced in February 2009 that it is offering a reward of $250,000 to anyone who can provide information that can help arrest the creator of the Conficker worm (i.e. the botmaster of the Conficker botnet). “Microsoft’s reward offer stems from the company’s recognition that the Conficker worm is a criminal attack,” a Microsoft statement said. This is actually a good start.However, this is not enough. The cyber world is so small that countries cannot be separated in cyber space. In order to teach the cyber criminals a lesson, we need this spirit to propagate to the Far East, Middle East and Russia as well and get well established through national and international laws.