Assignment : Cybercrime
By: Inga Draagum
The London police arrested a schoolboy in April, when
they discovered a large amount of money flowing threw his bank account. The boy
was also caught while logged in to various virtual systems and forums. The boy
was leading what the police say is one of the biggest “Distributed denial of
service” attacks. Ddos attacks causes Internet servers to shutdown. The victim
of this massive attack was ironically, the internet´s “watchdog” Spamhouse,
which is a company that tracks Internet spam senders. The attack was claimed to
disrupt the functionality of the interned worldwide, but the hacker only
managed to shut down the Spamhouse´s Internet page and e-mail server. The
16-year-old schoolboy was claimed to be a part of an international gang of
cyber-crooks, but the police have no idea of how this boy got implicated in
this Internet crime activity. The schoolboy was released on bail but is facing
a trail later this year.
There is no known reason for why this schoolboy was
attending these Internet crime activities. One theory that I think might have
caused this boy to implicate in such Internet activity, is the disinhibiting
effect called “Minimization of status”. On the Internet you are anonymous,
which causes people to do stuff they don’t normally would have done.
Minimization of status is accorded to theory; when people participate in crimes
do to the lack of boundaries and authorization online. At the Internet you are
equalized due to anonymity, and your status in the community have no meaning
here. You can therefore participate in crimes online that you could not have
been participated in, in real life. This boy might have felt that he was doing
something great, in terms of messing around whit people of higher “status”
within the community. I think that he did this because he liked the though of
being in control over something of high significance in the real world.
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