How serious is cyber crime in Malaysia?

Nowadays, the usage of internet is grown very rapidly. It has promoted a rapid development in many areas such as business, entertainment, sports, education and many more. Meaning that, it has promoted a greater opportunity for people to improve themselves in many ways. Even though technologies have provided a lot of advantages to all of us, it also comes with many disadvantages too. One of the major concerns is the rise of the cybercrime. Our group was assigned to study the seriousness of cybercrime in Malaysia. To obtain an acceptable and true fact, we have searched all the related information in many media such as newspaper articles, blog and others. From our reading and the news in television, most of the victims are among female. Less male are reported becoming the victim of the cybercrime. Cybercrime is actually very serious in Malaysia. Tan Sri Ismail Omar, the Inspector General of Police said that cases that happened recently was Malaysian hacker jailed in US. Lin Mun Poo, a Malaysian citizen, had admitted earlier this year to hacking into the US central bank, various private financial institutions and possessing stolen bank card and credit card numbers. This Malaysian hacker tried to sell stolen bank card and credit card numbers in US, without noticed the purchaser was in fact the US undercover agent. Bil Type of Cybercrime 2005 1 2 3 4 5 Intrusion Fraud Hacker Haressment Others Total Case 467 149 87 43 119 865 2006 897 287 68 51 69 1372 Year 2007 385 364 182 31 76 1038 2008 766 907 277 72 101 2123

Based on the statistics, we can see that there is an increment in from 2005 to 2008. In 2005 to 2006, intrusion gives the highest contribution in cybercrime, followed by fraud, hacker and harassment. But from 2007-2008, there is a rapidly increase in fraud where it has overcome intrusion.

Cybercrime is increasing at an alarming rate worldwide with more than a million people becoming victims every single day. According to the Norton Cybercrime Report 2011, the victims of cybercrime also paid clearly with a total loss of RM1.21 trillion to cybercriminals in 2010. Futhermore, Effendy Ibrahim, director of consumer business at Symantec Asia Pacific said that cybercrime do not only costs victims financially but emotionally too. Last year, cybersecurity Malaysia received over 8,000 reports about cybercrime via its cyber999 hotline. In June 2011, there is one cybercrime case which was become top news where Malaysian government website had been hacked. This is happen because hackers heard about Malaysian government who blocked sites like the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks and even blocking out movies and television shows. They think that Malaysian governments are taking away basic human right. Thus, they decide to hack Malaysian government website. Malaysian officials said attempts had been made to hack 51 websites and at least 41 had been disrupted. Other than the hacking of Malaysian government websites, there are many real world cases of cyber crime that occur in our daily life without being realized. According to the Cybersecurity Malaysia, more than 4000 cases were reported for this past two years. Cybersecurity Malaysia is not a law enforcement agency. Instead, they just provide support to the enforcement agencies such as the police and the victims in ensuring that justice will prevail regardless the space where the crime is conducted. They also assist in cyber forensic and analysis such as analyzing the evidence and providing expert witnesses for relevant cases. Actually, there is no comprehensive definition of cyber crime but we can say that there are three categories of cybercrimes. The first one is when information and communications technology systems and intellectual property become targets of exploitation, intrusion, identity and information theft. The most common crime committed under this area is fake profile on social network or online hate community that is also created on social network or personal blog or websites. The second category of cyber crime is when ICT devices are used as means to commit crimes. For example, computers at home are used to run malicious programs to intrude other computers to steal money, identity and password. Email account hacking is also one of the most popular cyber crime that falls in this category. Usually, the victims email account password is stolen and the account is misused for sending out malicious code, another possibility is that the hacker tries to steal private information from the victim and also the victims email account password is stolen and emails are sent to people in the victims address book. The last category is where ICT

devices are used as mediums of committing crimes. The example of cyber crime in this category is online gambling and also online sale of illegal articles and artwork. Besides that, the uses of internet and computer by terrorist also part of cyber crime. Nowadays, many terrorist are using virtual as well physical storage media for hiding information and records of their illicit business. From all the data that were obtained, it can be concluded that the cybercrimes in Malaysia are getting serious. However, they are not as serious as the developed countries. This is because the citizens in all those countries are exposed to the technologies before we do. As a proof, the Melissa virus was created in United States in March 1999. This had caused a big damage and lost which was about 80 million dollars. We are quite sure that at that moment not all citizens in Malaysia were exposed to the usage of computer and the technologies. Cybercrimes give a lot of bad impact to such as towards the individual, family institution, society and our country especially. Thus, all of us must be aware of this problem and have a good self-control.