Social Media and Cyber Crime words that we don’t correlate quite often but they have a connection deeper than we understand. It’s not that social media is a complete NO – NO, on one side it can do wonders and on the other it can make you wonder horrendously, it’s a double edged sword, with one end stronger and sharper than the other one, the latter one I believe. Now, let’s move over to its other half Cyber Crime, you must have heard about it, read about it or even talked about it, you may associate cybercrime with money theft and identity theft, but it’s not all about theft, to mention a few Hacking, Cyber bulling, Defamation by morphing and terrorism are a part of this swamp. Where most of these can breakdown one’s moral or self-esteem, the last one is capable of harming national security, there are hundreds of site regarding terrorist and terrorism which not only provides people with the updates about their activities but also acts as a recruiting agency by brain washing the tender minds. Now coming back to the topic why is cybercrime associated with social media, because every wants to kill a sitting duck, it’s too easy to trap people because of booming social media popularity, the obvious social media addiction, the vast transition from emails to social media and lastly rising usage of social media over smartphones and someone once said “the information is as good as its source” and what’s a better source to know about a person straight from himself. Posting your photographs on Facebook or updating your status about the places you visited or are going to or tweeting each and every thing every now and then your twitter handles is what makes you susceptible to cybercrimes. In this tech savvy generation as we are moving on we are losing something behind us may it be the real connections, the joy or the power of one’s presence, and there’s even a possibility that at which speed we are moving PRIVACY can became a myth.

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Innovation and Technology have changed the meaning and rules of the corporate and personnel life. The new digital era means mandatory to have Facebook, Whatsapp, LinkedIn and likewise other site(s) existence with everyday to every- hour update of self life and mood; not to mention these so called social networking sites are all meaning-less until people read and comment on with their suggestions and write something in continuation or fresh.

 This is probably the best and fastest way of communication and connectivity. These all are the reasons to go online and have account and to be active on social network.

 BUT, there is another side of the coin as well which is like ticking bomb. Some people already experience and burnt their fingers in this; it’s time to warn and educate people about the negatives of the same.

 Cyber world is like scrapbook of-course digital and non-erasable that clearly means that what-so-ever is written on it remains even if the person change his or her views about a thing or person. This tweets or comments can really hamper the reputation of an individual or company as still there are many who read and believe in this system “undoubtedly”.

From digital piracy to identity theft all are the real haunting stories which are making news and fear factor not only for companies, persons but for authorities as well.

“Freedom of expression cannot be ensured without respect to privacy in communications”. (Frank La Rue, United Nations Special report on Freedom of Expression and Opinion).

 [** http://www.socialsamosa.com/2014/09/social-media-cyber-crime/]

Conclusion is that it’s a strong recommendation to understand the low-side and time to understand what to and to what extend go on-line; along-with need to set and understand security settings.

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With the usage of internet becoming wide spread, cyber crimes are also on the rise. Internet-based social networking sites have created a revolution in social connectivity. Most common reason for these crimes is the human element, which could be greed, carelessness or sheer innocence. Crimes are being committed in banks, especially w.r.t credit card details and on social media. Most computer infections come from websites. Crimes against women are on the rise on social media sites due to various reasons including indiscriminate postings of pictures and status updates. Almost always, hackers are able to break through because of the failure to change default login and passwords. Other times the use of Phishing / spear phishing or social engineering techniques are being used. Usually an email that looks like it is from a legitimate organization or person, but is not and contains a link or file with malware.  Phishing attacks typically try to snag any random victim.  Spear phishing attacks target a specific person or organization as their intended victim.  The malware downloaded information from RSA that then helped the hackers learn how to defeat RSA’s security token.  In May and June 2011, a number of defense contractors’ networks were breached via the compromised RSA token. Sometimes zero day defects are exploited by high tech crackers. With the advent of IoT, security now shifts to a higher level, as a weak smart device can blow a hole in the entire network. E.g. Target – was hacked because of a weak smart device on the same network as that of the servers.

 Basic precautions like a strong password, a well known antivirus, sensible postings on social media, selective accepting of friend requests and avoiding clicking on unknown links can go a long way in securing networks. For corporate, regular security audits and business continuity plans are a must, to ensure there is no breakdown in business in case of a hack. Always use high security settings on social networking sites, and be very limited in the personal information you share.  Monitor what others are posting about you on their online discussions. Always use anti-virus and firewall software.  Change your passwords regularly, and do not reuse old passwords. Beware of unsolicited contacts from individuals in person, on the telephone, or on the Internet who are seeking corporate or personal data.  Monitor your bank statements, balances, and credit reports. Never share usernames, passwords, social security numbers, credit cards, bank information, salaries, computer network details, security clearances, home and office physical security and logistics, capabilities and limitations of work systems, or schedules and travel itineraries.

 Some of the computer crimes done with the help of social media are:-

  Vishing or Voice Phishing: - Personal details from sites such as Face book, Twitter and LinkedIn are used to scam customer.”Vishing involves fraudster calling and saying they are from bank. Here the customer is a weakest Link. companies.

  Cyber Defamation:-The criminals send email containing defamatory matters to all concerned

  Phishing

  Net Extortion.

Data mining techniques can be implemented rapidly on existing software and hardware platforms. Some algorithms like Extended Apriori and Apriori star exist to discover the relationships between data attributes upon all levels of fuzzy taxonomic structures that exist in single table.

The purpose of the paper is to address the issue of mining fuzzy association rules in databases designed using Entity-Relationship (ER) Models at multiple levels to find the patterns of the people involved in cybercrime with respect to their age and employment to the degree of crime.. The study aims to extend the previous developed algorithms Extended Apriori and Apriori star to discover a new algorithm. The study will help in standardizing algorithms for finding appropriate results from database tables containing fuzzy data.

 The proposed study focuses on developing an algorithm that will use fuzzy logic for finding fuzzy association rules from ER models for Cyber Crime. The study will help to find the patterns and identify the category of people involved in cybercrime. Analysis of the transaction data which includes the sample personal data and the regions where they live converted into fuzzy taxonomic structures reflecting age and region involved in cybercrime. The study will focus on finding rules such as: [Employed (medium), Age = Young] => [Violent Crimes (low)] which implies that test sample of the age group 20-30 and 30-40 who is employed might engage in cyber crime with qualitative relevance low. In the rule mentioned the young, medium and low belong to three different entities designed using ER models. Another example of such a rule can be Height = Tall  Game = Basket Ball which implies that a person with the height 5’ 7’’ – 5’ 9’’ and 6’ 0 “+ might opt for Basket Ball game where group 5’ 7” – 5’ 9” partially belongs to Tall with degree Tall5’7”–5’ 9”and both Height and Game belong to two different entities. In this example the attributes Height of the candidate table will be first converted into fuzzy taxonomic structures respectively reflecting partial belonging of one item to another.

 The paper discovers a new algorithm Extended Apriori Star to find such kind of rules. The fuzzy extensions that will be presented in this study will enable us to discover not only crisp generalized association rules but also fuzzy generalized association rules when databases consisting of several tables organized in a schema within the framework of fuzzy taxonomic structures and helps to show the patterns of the people involved in Cyber Crime. Strong Association rules between items of fuzzy nature existing in multiple tables can be calculated that will undoubtedly help in understanding things in broad spectrum.



Reference:
 Praveen Arora, Ram Kumar, Ashwani Kush, “Mining fuzzy generalized association rules for ER models”.International Journal of Information Technology and Knowledge Management (IJITKM), 2008, vol-1, issue-2, pp 191-198.

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Computer crime, or cybercrime, is any crime that involves a computer and define cyber crime as offences that are committed against individuals with an intention to cause mental harm to the victim whether directly or indirectly, making use of the modern telecommunication networks such as Internet (Chat rooms, emails, notice boards and groups) and mobile phones (SMS/MMS)".

 Crime committed using a computer and the internet to steal a person’s identity or illegal imports or malicious programs cybercrime is nothing but where the computer used as an object or subject of crime.

  Types of Cyber attacks, by percentage (source- FBI)
 1. Financial fraud: 11%

 2. Sabotage of data/networks: 17%

 3. Theft of proprietary information: 20%

 4. System penetration from the outside: 25%

 5. Denial of service: 27%

 6. Unauthorized access by insiders: 71%

 7. Employee abuse of internet privileges: 79%

 8. Viruses: 85%

 In general cyber crimes are categorized as follows:

 1. Data crime

 2. Network Crime

 3. Access Crime

 This article not only tells us what cyber crime is but also explains the impacts over the different levels of the society. The understanding of the behavior of cyber criminals and impacts of cyber crimes on society will help to find out the sufficient means to overcome the situation. The way to overcome these crimes can broadly be classified into three categories: Cyber Laws (referred as Cyber laws), Education and Policy making.


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The technological advancements have had a profound effect on society. It has revolutionized the quality of life and has resulted in several amenities which earlier were thought as impossible. For example, an individual, living in New Delhi, is able to book an airline ticket from London to New York, with the click of a mouse button. No one would have thought of this facility some 40 years ago.


Despite all these paraphernalia provided by technological advancements, danger in the form of cybercrime is generated exponentially due to the fact that when it comes to cyber, things operate in virtual mode. Thus, we have cyber criminals who steal the information such as credit card details or they deface the official website of government to create communal and social disturbance sometimes resulting in communal riots. Not only the resort to these cheap measures, they black mail gullible users (who are searching for jobs) on social websites such as linked in and post fake appointment letters with the purpose of extracting money from them.

Cyber Criminals have social media for the following reasons:-

1. Increase in usage of social media over smart phones.

2. The vast transition from emails to social media.

3. Social media is becoming an Ideal place for Crime.

4. Social Media Addiction

5. Booming Social media popularity

Thus, in a nutshell cybercrime is here to stay and will increase substantially in future as dependency is bound to increase.

Before moving to cyber crime, we must know what is Digital Convergence. The meaning of "digital convergence" lies in the ability to view the same content from different types of devices and the credit goes to the digitization of content (movies, pictures, music, voice, text) and the development of connections methods.

Digital Convergence is the main reason of underlying components of digital technology and their features such as video , voice, pictures, text, broadcasts, streaming media presentation, global connectivity etc. When all these features and the abilities from multiple electronic systems are merged to enable individuals interact, collaborate, play and share information in many different ways.

Now we discuss cyber-crime. A crime is considered as a ‘cyber crime’ if the reason behind committing crime involved the use of the Internet or web services and
1. The attack is done to harm the data or other digital material stored on a device which is connected to Internet.
2. The attack is done to destroy the services by the remote systems.

As the technology is evolving at an extremely fast pace, Cyber-security is playing an extremely important role in more and more institutions. Integrating operations and new technology will need considering new sound concepts, funds, and open interactions between industry and government.

Thus increasing Cyber-security is a major issue faced by the security practitioners. Now, so that a connectivity is established between all the machines and people on the planet, the technical industry is evolving rapidly and thus it gave rise to ‘Internet of Everything’.

 Moreover, the military services are integrating information technology position with traditional operational skills such as each military branch must develop the capability to support defense cyber operations and cyber attacks. Therefore, the military must integrate cyber-security into both training and operations without any issues.

 Consider cloud computing, which has shown growth in the military in the year 2014. When the huge amount of data is combined with comparatively small budgets, dependency on cloud computing increases. But if we are moving our data to the cloud, one would need a reliable access and hence greater cyber security.

 Crimes related to social networking sites -The consumers tend to click on a link in an email for their favorite brands. And at times the results are quite unexpected. The spam messages pop up from popular social networks. The malware virus is installed on user’s when they click on contaminated site. For Eg: The following messages were sent:

 • ‘connect on LinkedIn’
• ‘You have 6 friend requests’


Cyber-crime is also leading to real world crime along with online crimes. This is because now a days, people “over-share” their personal information across various social platforms like what’s app, facebook etc. For Eg: - A survey has shown that t 35% users post their plans for vacation on social networking sites which exaggerates the crime rate.
We also need fresh ideas to consider Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as drones are being increasingly used for various purposes like communications relays that are used to extend line-of- sight radio and data links. Such an aerial solution helps to reduce the dependence on expensive satellites. But for the UAVs become successful in the skies, we need better control on the networks to prevent collision of aircrafts( manned or unmanned), w3hich could also be a planned one(by the cyber-attackers).
Thus the rapid growth in cyber security threats is a result of convergence. It has brought different types of criminal together in one space be it fraudsters in finance or in communications service, hackers, spies and extremists. So, there is a need of a converged response, both at the organizational level and above.