Lesson 5.2: Computer crime law: what is illegal almost everywhere
Countries word their laws differently, but the same acts are crimes almost everywhere: illegal access, illegal interception, interfering with data, interfering with a system, misusing devices and computer fraud. These categories come from the Council of Europe's Budapest Convention, which more than 70 countries have joined, and you'll see how national laws express them (the US CFAA, the UK Computer Misuse Act, Germany's Criminal Code, the EU directive, Turkey's Penal Code). In the lab you investigate a break-in, match each thing the intruder did to a category, and preserve the evidence a prosecutor in any country would need.
19 min
You will learn to
- Name the offence categories shared by computer crime laws worldwide
- Give examples of national laws that express them
- Explain why a valid password doesn't make access lawful
- Match an intruder's actions to the categories
- Preserve log evidence with hashes
Key terms
- Budapest Convention
- The Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime (2001), the first international treaty on computer crime.
- Illegal access
- Entering all or part of a computer system without the right to.
- Illegal interception
- Secretly capturing data while it travels between or inside systems.
- Data interference
- Damaging, deleting, changing or hiding data without the right to.
- System interference
- Seriously hindering how a system works.
- Misuse of devices
- Making, selling or possessing tools or passwords designed or used to commit these crimes.
- Computer-related fraud
- Using computers or data to gain money or property unlawfully.
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