Is twatting a fly with your laptop...
... computer misuse?
The number of incidents of computer misuse in England and Wales reached 1.8 million in the year up to March 2015, according to official crime statistics released today. The Office for National Statistics data, based on a household survey of around 17,000 people, reveal 1.19 million cases of computer viruses. There were a …
I surmise that many people nowadays think twice, nay eight times, before contacting the authorities about anything. What are the odds that you are the one who will end up being punished? "Allo allo allo, this looks very much like a non-standard, unregistered pirate copy of XYZ... And what are these JPEGs of a naked child in the bath???? Very interesting indeed, probably worth ten to twenty in the slammer... Please accompany me to the station sir, while my colleagues load up all your computers, spare parts, backup hard drives, tapes, documents, etc. We'll let you have them back - if you're found not guilty - when our investigations are complete". (Ha ha, i.e. "never").
I'm not sure if the numbers in this are meant to denote incidents that were reported to the police, incidents that were recorded by an ONS survey, or an extrapolation based on survey results.
Personally, I'd say that my externally accessible home PC is subject to several thousand attempts of unauthorized access every day, so 1.8m could be a per-capita value. Yes, my firewall blocks the attempts, but comparisons to checking that your neighbours door and windows are securely locked are appropriate...
My spam filter logs that many misuse attempts in a year. But I haven't reported them to plod.
On the other hand, I have (in my capacity as an open source developer) occasionally been in receipt of misdirected complaints. The kind of scenario where luser installs Apache web server, sees Apache default page or error page, and sends a very angry and incoherent complaint to Apache about having hacked them. I daresay Plod gets more of that sort of nonsense than we do.
The kind of scenario where luser installs Apache web server, sees Apache default page or error page, and sends a very angry and incoherent complaint to Apache about having hacked them.
Oh gods, I thought I'd managed to bury that memory, but this happened to us.
We were setting up a new site on a dedicated server for a client (large well-known commercial property developer) and we hadn't yet put the bindings in place for the domain, but they managed their own DNS and had set up the A record and publicised it internally.
Cue panicked emails, then phone calls from the Digital Marketing team that they had been hacked by "The Apache" hacker collective...
Not one of them had even bothered to actually read what it says on the Apache default page:
"If you're seeing this page through a web browser, it means you have set up Apache successfully."