A brief synopsis of cybercrime

For many involved in dense criminals, cybercrime is the nightmare of the 21st century. It represents millions in illicit profits every year. Vast criminal networks spanning the world are now actively involved in cybercrime of one kind or another. The potential for future earnings is almost limitless and the relative safety that the ISP’s cybercriminals mean that it is extremely difficult to catch. The victims pile up. However, things were not always like this.

In the early days of cybercrime, the cybercrime world was viewed as a fairly harmless joke by computer geeks showing how much they knew about how computer networks work. It was equivalent to a challenge, you say it cannot be done and we will show you how it can be done. It was intended to cause relatively little harm and criminal defense attorneys did not have their work cut out to show this. In fact, few, if any, specific criminal laws were in the statutes regulating cybercrime in the early days and most criminal defenses were standard.

As times changed, so did the nature of cybercrime. More technological advances and cheaper access to hardware and software made the Internet a domain that anyone could access. More sinister fraud caught the attention of authorities. Crimes involving children, such as child pornography, became widely known. With the escalation of the criminal element of cybercrime, new laws and specialized criminal defense attorneys were needed.

Yet even in the past five years, cybercrime was still controllable. Cybercrime was not a major source of income for criminal gangs in the late 20th century. It has only been since the millennium that things have changed.

However, without the global implementation of criminal sanctions against the actions of cybercriminals, the final criminal defense still exists, namely jurisdiction. Unlike a crime committed in the real world, it is physically possible for a criminal to be in two places at once when it comes to cybercrime. You can commit a crime in the US while sitting comfortably in your apartment in Russia. Consequently, universal laws will be needed if a criminal defense mechanism is to be put in place to combat these growing problems.

Fortunately for the cybercriminal, yet another perfect criminal defense remains: the government’s apathy to come together to combat this growing problem.