Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

2. 
illegal content, e.g., pirated music and child pornography,
3. 
crimes unique to electronic networks such as hacking and denial-of-service attacks,
4.
 
crimes unique to cyberspace which intent to have effects to physical systems and 
or in the physical world, e.g., the cyber manipulation of process control systems 
in the gas transport grid causing a pipeline rupture and subsequent explosions.

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20
CHAPTER 3
New and emerging threats of cyber crime and terrorism
Many people today think that cybercrime is recent problem. The contrary is true as 
the following examples show:
• According to 
DHS (2014)
, “Beginning in 1970, and over the course of three years, 
the chief teller at the Park Avenue branch of New York's Union Dime Savings 
Bank manipulated the account information on the bank's computer system to 
embezzle over $1.5 million from hundreds of customer accounts.” Many more 
types of cybercrimes (e.g., forgery and fraud) have followed since then.
• Although the first replicating computer codes were developed in the 1960s, 
it took until 1971 before Bob Thomas developed the Creeper virus which 
infected other systems in the Arpanet. Although unwillingly running computer 
code at systems owned by another organization, his “experiment” was not yet 
considered a crime at that time.
• In early 1977, an insider over a weekend stole hundreds of original computer 
tapes and their back-ups from the computer center and back-up storage of a 
chemical industry company called ICI. He tried to extort ICI and requested 
275.000 pound sterling (
Geelof, 2007
). After the perpetrator was apprehended, 
the newspaper headline stated “The theft of computer data of ICI marks a new 
era of criminality” (
Korver, 2007
).
• On November 2, 1988, Robert T. Morris released the first computer worm on the 
Internet which infected thousands of systems. In 1990, Morris was convicted under 
the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced to three years of 
probation, 400 h of community service, and a fine of 10,000 USD (
Markoff, 1990
).
• In 1994, Russian hackers made 40 transfers which totaled over 10 million USD 
from Citybank to bank accounts in Finland, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, 
the United States, Israel and Switzerland. All but $400K of the money was 
recovered (
Harmon, 1995
). This case showed that cybercrime could result in 
unauthorized transfers of high amounts of money.
• In 1995, the first phishing attempts took place.
• In 1997, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) was formed. EDT created 
tools to establish an electronic version of sit-ins on the internet. On April 10, 
1998, their Floodnet tool was used by protesters from many nations to perform 
denial-of-service attacks on the website of the President of Mexico and later on 
the White House (
Wray, 1998
).
• In January 1998, a disgruntled system operator remotely manipulated the 
SCADA system of a coal-fired power plant putting it in emergency mode and 
removed the SCADA system software.
• In 2005, the air conditioning system of a European bank’s computer center 
was deliberately hacked. The computer room temperature slowly increased and 
caused a shutdown of all computer system services.
• In 2006, the Russian Business Network (RBN) started. Soon after its inception, 
RBN was a central point for offering cybercrime tools and services for spam, 
phishing, Trojans and more.
• In July 2010, the existence of the one month earlier detected Stuxnet process 
control system worm became widely known. Stuxnet specifically targeted 

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