Africa: Predatory Cyber Crime in South Africa - Current Risks and Realities

analysis

Nearly a year ago, a specialist in software risk management and data storage, Marthinus Engelbrecht, warned that while statistics on violent crimes in South Africa hit the headlines every day because of their severity, cyber crimes were much more common and had a much bigger impact. (The New Age, 14.09.2011) Crime analysts and commentators have regularly warned about the insidious nature of cyber crime, and, occasionally predicted an upswing in its occurrence. The build up to the World Cup soccer tournament in 2010, for example, provided a platform for estimates of scale, some of which appeared exaggerated. There are in fact no statistics to reflect what was eventually experienced. However, numerous factors indicate that the risk of South African falling victim to cyber crime has grown immensely.

There is general consensus that cyber crime is any crime that is committed by means of a computer device which is linked to other computers through the Internet. At the same time, there is much uncertainty about the full range of such crimes and how they affect our daily lives. In a typical cyber crime situation, the computer may be used either as an instrument by which to initiate the crime, or as the target of the crime, as stated by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Researchers' Joey Jansen van Vuuren and Marthie Grobler in a study done in 2009. The scope of activities which could fall within the definition of cyber crime is potentially quite broad, ranging from purely malicious or intimidatory invasions of privacy, to the theft and abuse of personal identity particulars and the fraudulent manipulation of electronic data to commit theft. At the level of state security, instances of data destruction through electronically transmitted malicious software have been reported. A common thread connecting these activities is the intrusive abuse of computers.

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