Do you need this or any other assignment done for you from scratch?
We have qualified writers to help you.
We assure you a quality paper that is 100% free from plagiarism and AI.
You can choose either format of your choice ( Apa, Mla, Havard, Chicago, or any other)
NB: We do not resell your papers. Upon ordering, we do an original paper exclusively for you.
NB: All your data is kept safe from the public.
It is generally accepted that the cyber environment provides people with both positive opportunities such as self-realization or creativity and negative ones involving specific problems. Unfortunately, the digital space can also become an atmosphere of involving children and adolescents in criminal acts, thus bringing to psychological issues by means of mobbing, cyber-fraud, embezzlement of money from an electronic parental purse, pornography, pedophiles acquaintance with children, free access to extremist websites, sale of drugs through the Internet, etc. Due to age characteristics, the insufficient educational activity of parents, the provision of unlimited opportunities in the online environment, and also due to the low media literacy of the population, people can become victims of cybercrime and sometimes even turn into criminals. In this connection, it is of great importance to identify potential problems that are encountered by law enforcement when computer crime organizations cannot ensure the safety and security of users.
Nowadays, people live in the era of the information society when computers and telecommunication systems cover all the spheres of human and state life. Focusing on telecommunications and global computer networks, it was impossible to foresee the opportunities for abuse these technologies could create. Today, among victims of criminals who operate in virtual space, there are not only adults but also children. Even though computer crime laboratories continuously update their products to ensure the safety and security of users, forensic computing faces plenty of problems. Online games are one of the most popular activities on the Internet, along with searching web pages and socializing (Britz, 2013). The main threats faced by users involve the following points:
- Phishing. The criminal web-environment generates many fake gaming sites. Some of them use URLs that are very similar to the addresses of real websites. An unsuspecting player is threatened not only by malicious programs but also by traps that can steal personal data and cause real financial problems (Hu, Chen, & Bose, 2013).
- Social networks. There are a lot of scammers with fake accounts that pretend to be producers of games, requiring to open personal information.
- Infected games and fraudulent programs. The user can easily infect his or her computer through hacked or fake computer games. Their creators abuse the hobbies of users, offering such games for downloading on the Internet. It is necessary to be especially careful when using email attachments and removable media, such as USB flash drives.
- Malicious programs. One of the most common malicious programs to date is Win32 / PSW.OnLineGames. This is a family of Trojans used in phishing attacks aimed specifically at users of computer games: malicious programs of this type are able to spy on typing text from the keyboard and sometimes include rootkits that can collect information related to online games and user credentials (Pfleeger, Pfleeger, & Margulies, 2015). It is characteristic that the information is transferred to the computer of the remote attacker. The members of the massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), such as Lineage, World of Warcraft, or Second Life, should be aware of these numerous threats.
As an example, one may note the case when about 18 thousand people lost hundreds of millions because of the bankruptcy of the virtual bank Ginko in Second Life. According to Scarle et al. (2012), prior to the bankruptcy, the bank had savings of more than 700 thousand dollars (or 190 million Linden dollars, the rate of which is relative to dollar as 270 to one). The official cause of bankruptcy was the massive withdrawal of money from accounts in Ginko as a result of the ban on gambling in Second Life. For a week, the virtual bank went bankrupt, and those who did not manage to withdraw their investments lost their savings. Some experts suspect that this was a planned action.
Another problem is pedophiles who increasingly go to the World Wide Web to satisfy their unhealthy lust through the psychological deception of children. According to Tikhonov and Bogoslovskii (2012), they actively use various computer programs so that no one can identify them by calculating their IP address, creating the identikit by video link, or determining the place of residence. Knowing the basics of child psychology, they get acquainted with minors in social networks, acquire confidence, and then, under the pretext of fun games, make them undress and commit disgusting things (Hu et al., 2013). Due to the anonymity of the media environment, this type of crime has become easier to implement. The pedophiles build trustful relationships with adolescents in chat rooms, forums, and social networks. They get acquainted with children, positioning themselves as a future good friend, a senior companion, and a sincere assistant. After establishing contact with minors, criminals can offer personal meetings, pictures of erotic nature, and intimate communication through a webcam (Reddy & Minnaar, 2015). Despite the ban and the abundance of regulations aimed at combating such crimes, it is rather difficult to control the correspondence of the online environment to the established norms and values as cybercrime strategies are ever-changing and quite resourceful.
References
Britz, M. (2013). Computer forensics and cyber crime: An introduction (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
Hu, Y., Chen, X., & Bose, I. (2013). Cybercrime enforcement around the globe. Journal of Information Privacy and Security, 9(3), 34-52.
Pfleeger, C. P., Pfleeger, S. L., & Margulies, J. (2015). Security in computing (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Reddy, E., & Minnaar, A. (2015). Safeguarding children from becoming victims of online sexual abuse facilitated by virtual worlds. Child Abuse Research in South Africa, 16(1), 23-39.
Scarle, S., Arnab, S., Dunwell, I., Petridis, P., Protopsaltis, A., & de Freitas, S. (2012). E-commerce transactions in a virtual environment: virtual transactions. Electronic Commerce Research, 12(3), 379-407.
Tikhonov, M. N., & Bogoslovskii, M. M. (2012). Pitfalls of new information and communication technologies. Scientific and Technical Information Processing, 39(2), 67-73.
Do you need this or any other assignment done for you from scratch?
We have qualified writers to help you.
We assure you a quality paper that is 100% free from plagiarism and AI.
You can choose either format of your choice ( Apa, Mla, Havard, Chicago, or any other)
NB: We do not resell your papers. Upon ordering, we do an original paper exclusively for you.
NB: All your data is kept safe from the public.