Criminal activities or offences carried out in a digital environment can be considered as cyber crime. In such crimes, either the computer itself is the target or the computer is used as a tool to commit a crime. Cyber crimes are carried out against either an individual, or a group, or an organisation or even against a country, with the intent to directly or indirectly cause physical harm, financial loss or mental harassment. A cyber criminal attacks a computer or a network to reach other computers in order to disable or damage data or services. Apart from this, a cyber criminal may spread viruses and other malwares in order to steal private and confidential data for blackmailing and extortion. A computer virus is some lines of malicious code that can copy itself and can have detrimental effect on the computers, by destroying data or corrupting the system. Similarly, malware is a software designed to specifically gain unauthorised access to computer systems. The nature of criminal activities are alarmingly increasing day-by-day, with frequent reports of hacking, ransomware attacks, denial-of-service, phishing, email fraud, banking fraud and identity theft.
