James George states that it is a story as old as humanity: "New times bring new crimes" (97, F1). First came cars, car thieves followed. Telephones were followed by telephone fraud. Now we have computers. Computers have made home, school and office life easier. Our society relies on computers. As a result of this dependency, computer use grows everyday. Along with the growing use of computers comes widespread computer crime. With the Internet becoming increasingly popular, more and more people are becoming computer literate, and networks are becoming more readily accessible. The rise in computer crime can easily be blamed upon the increasing number of users. The Internet is widely deemed as a new community and "wild" electric frontier. Either way you look at it, the Internet offers cover for con artists, ground for drifters, and plenty of places where larceny can lurk. It provides the same opportunities for crime that the real world offers.
             Internet crimes, however, carry their own intricacies and innovations. These online crimes take advantage of the very same technologies that make the Internet possible. The Parkers noted that the most common crimes committed on the Internet are the same basic variations of the "four main time-tested, real-world crimes: Forgery (of E-mail), assault (on your Web site, E-mail box, or computer system), fraud (cyber scams), and robbery (theft of valuable information)" (Parker, Parker, 1998, pp. 178, 189). Various types of people commit computer crimes, the two most familiar being hackers and crackers. A hacker is a person who enjoys exploring the details of a programmable system and how to stretch their capabilities, a person who programs enthusiastically, even obsessively. A cracker is one who breaks security on a system. Although hackers and crackers both break into computer systems, their motives are different. Hackers seem to bre...