Concepts and Terms

The rapidly expanding capabilities of information and communications technologies (ICT) have created new crimes and new ways to commit old crimes. Criminal threats include: computer intrusions, distributed denial of service attacks, malware (the insertionof malicious software code into a computer), stealing ICT services, online child pornography and the misuse of email. This brief examines some of the terminology and sets out a definitional framework for measuring and analysing high tech crime. Labels defined include computer crime, computer related crime, cybercrime and high tech crime. The brief notes the fundamental distinction between offences relating to ICT as the object of offending and those relating to ICT as a tool for offending, and considersimplications for data collection and analysis.