Trends in Computer Crime
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb025876 |
| Date | 01 April 1998 |
| Published date | 01 April 1998 |
| Pages | 157-162 |
| Author | Richard E. Overill |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
Journal of Financial Crime — Vol. 6 No. 2 — Computer Crime
Trends in Computer Crime
Richard E. Overill
INTRODUCTION
In this article the historical development of com-
puter crime is traced and analysed. Some major
examples of the phenomenon are examined with
particular reference to financial and commercial
information systems and institutions. The varied
motivations of computer criminals are also con-
sidered. Finally, some lessons for today's financial
and commercial IT communities are offered.
SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS
It is convenient to define computer crime as any
criminal act which involves one or more com-
puters either as the object of the crime or as acces-
sories in its commission. Computer crime may
then be subdivided into computer related crime
(CRC) and computer assisted crime (CAC). In the
former, the computer or its contents is the subject
of the criminal act (eg hacking or denial of service
attacks), while in the latter, the computer is merely
an accessory in the commission of a crime which
could at least in principle have been committed by
other means (eg financial fraud or embezzlement).
In this article, those areas of CRC and CAC cov-
ered by the UK Computer Misuse Act 1990
(CMA90) will be broadly surveyed; essentially, the
Basic Hacking offence" and the Unauthorised
Modification offence of CMA90 relate to CRC,
while the Ulterior Intent offence relates to CAC.
EARLY DAYS
The 1970s and early 1980s saw a number of semi-
nal developments in the USA which laid the con-
ceptual and practical foundations for future tools
for computer crime. Around 1972, National
Security Agency (NSA) spook Dan Edwards
coined the term Trojan Horse, after the Greeks'
ingenious scheme to end the siege of Troy.1 It
denotes an apparently benign macro or utility with
undocumented side-effects which may be security
violating or palpably destructive. Trojans were
occasionally referred to as Trapdoors because their
effect can be similar, but the term 'trapdoor' prop-
erly denotes a back door or security loophole left
in a system which can be exploited for access
purposes.
By the early 1970s, in the context of the Cold
War, the US military was sufficiently concerned
about the security of sensitive information held in
computer systems to mount a number of intrusion
experiments. During late 1973 and early 1974,
David Stryker, John Shore and Stanley Wilson of
the Naval Research Laboratory subverted the Exec
VIII operating system of a Sperry Rand Univac
1108 computer2 using security violating Trojan
Horse techniques to obtain unauthorised and sur-
reptitious access to classified information. Mean-
while, between 1972 and 1975, in a series of
experiments for the US Air Force, Steven Lipner
and Roger Schell used both trapdoors and Trojans
to subvert the MIT-Honeywell Multics operating
system into yielding up confidential information
without leaving a trace.3
In 1982, John Shoch and Jon Hupp from the
Rank Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (RX-
PARC) reported the first experiments with Worm
programs.4 The aim of their work was to 'mop up'
the idle time on a network of computers with
useful computations in a manner transparent to
the users. The worm program replicates itself in
each node of the network and activates a portion of
the desired computation if the node is quiescent; if
a node becomes busy its computation is suspended
and withdrawn.
The first computer virus was written as an
experiment by Fred Cohen in November 1983
while a graduate student in Len Adelman's com-
puter security class at the University of Southern
California.5 As distinct from worms, viruses are
parasitic replicators which must attach themselves
to other machine instructions in order to be exe-
cuted by the processor. The first virus infection 'in
the wild', by the BRAIN virus from Pakistan, was
recorded in 1986.
DEVELOPMENTS IN CRC
Basic hacking, or unauthorised access, has been
practised by students, computer technophiles,
commercial spies and counter-intelligence services,
among others. Their motivations include recrea-
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