Computer hacking - high-tech crime

You can rob a bank without leaving a house these days. Who needs stocking masks, guns and get-away cars? If you are a computer whizz-kid, you could grab your first million armed with nothing more dangerous than a personal computer (PC), a telephone and a modem to connect them. All you have to do is dial into the networks that link the computers in large organizations together; type in a couple of passwords and you can rummage about in the information that is stored there to your heart's content.

Fortunately it isn't always quite as easy as it sounds. But, as more and more information is processed on computer, crime seems set to grow.

No one knows exactly how much money is stolen by key-board criminals-banks and other companies tend to be very secretive if it happens to them. It doesn't exactly fill customers with confidence of they think their bank account can be accessed by anyone with a PC!

Some experts believe that only around a tenth of all computer crimes are actually reported.

Most computer crimes are “inside jobs”, where staff with access to the company's computers fiddle with the records. A comparatively small amount are committed by the more glamorous – and headline – grabbing –hackers.

The true hacker, it seems, doesn't t do it for financial gain. The thrill appears to be not in getting rich, but in beating the system.

“It has never been my intention to steal anything”, said Singh, one of the Britain's notorious hackers. “I really see myself as a highly skilled software engineer.” Edward Singh first came to public attention after claiming that he had hacked into American and British government and military computers.

His mission seems to be to prove just how insecure their systems are.

As with everything else, hackers start young in the States. A 12 year-old boy in Detroit was accused of entering a company's credit rating computer and distributing the numbers he found there. His mother told reporters that he spent up to 14 hours on his computer during the weekend. ”He didn't bother me “, she said. “ I figured computers, that's the thing of the day.”

Some years ago, two New York teenagers, one aged 14 and one aged 17, were charged with breaking into a computer system owned by a company that publishes computer magazines. They were alleged to have changed polite recorded greetings to rude messages, added bomb threats and wiped advertisers' orders. Customers linked into the system only to be told that 'Daffy Duck is not available'! The company estimated that the tampering had cost $2.4 million.

Prevention is probably easier than detection, and many companies now spend lots of time and money devising programs using passwords and codes. Of course, all this is no use at all if computer users tell each other their passwords.

There are plenty of software companies who specialise in writing software that make computers hacker-proof. One company in the States set out to prove that its system can defeat hackers by asking over 2000 of them to try to hack in. The hackers were given two weeks to discover the secret message stored on two PCs in offices in New York and San Francisco. The message reads: ‘The persistent hunter who wins his prize sooner or later becomes the hunted.” But not one hacker managed it.