Cyber crimes are here

Jun 22, 2008 Editorial

Cyber crimes are things that happen in every other country except Guyana.

At least that is what we thought, until we came face to face with a report that someone had used a computer with an address assigned to Kaieteur News to send a text message to Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud at 18:55 hours on Friday.

The message purports to come from an individual named Fine Man and threatened havoc in Regent Street on Friday evening.

This prompted the Police to descend on the newspaper with people skilled in computers and who can investigate crime. The Police also used a computer specialist attached to this company, and together they sought to unravel the mystery.

They questioned everyone, and in the process set many hearts aquiver. They treated everyone as a suspect and sought to find out who among the staff was so technologically savvy as to access the server to send a text message.

Sending text messages by computer is not rocket science; anyone with a modicum of intelligence could do it. But the situation becomes stranger when investigations of the server find that every action to which the server was exposed all day Friday had been deleted.

Only two people had direct physical access to the server, and they were busy fashioning the newspaper at that time.

But assuming that they had quit working on the newspaper at that time, it would have taken them a considerable length of time to perform the task that the investigators discovered.

With the security system in place, no stranger could have come into the building to access the server, which is never used as a work station in any case.

But the telephone company, which is the Internet Provider, firmly identifies the server as the source of the text message to Minister Persaud.

This text message purportedly had the tail piece of a password which provides some help to the investigators, but it also raises some questions that now point the investigators to the fact that someone has remote access to the server.

This means that someone with the knowledge — a computer hacker — has been able to access the server from outside the company.

In the developed world, we read of hackers accessing even the security systems of the most sensitive locations in the Untied States. Some have been known to access bank accounts and remove money, while others have been known to snarl routine operations. But these are things not common to Guyana. At least so many of us believe.

Computers have made life easier for mankind by way of storing information. They have virtually replaced the Encyclopaedia and they provide ready access to just about every corner of the world.

As soon as something happens in some country the information is almost immediately posted on the electronic highway.
The situation is such that people now use the computer to do shopping and pay bills without leaving their homes.

People communicate via computer to the extent that letter writing as we know it has become a dead art. Such is the extent of the communication via the computer that people even pose problems for the established telephone companies; computers offer voice communication.

But there is the downside, and we are finding that the negatives could have dire consequences.

The suggestion that Kaieteur News harboured a wanted man could never be taken for a joke.

Not so long ago, in Berbice, someone sent a terror threat, and within a short while the investigators were able to locate the computer.

The computer at Kaieteur News has been identified, but what needs to be known is the extent to which unauthorized people could access and manipulate the very tool that could be so helpful to mankind.

For example, doctors use the computer to perform surgeries in other countries without having to be there; businessmen move money from one country to another electronically; cars and ocean-going vessels have expansive navigation systems that make it almost impossible to become lost, and the list gets longer.

But, by the same token, there are people who could use the computer to achieve the exact opposite of what is intended, and we at Kaieteur News are finding this out the hard way.

So the investigations have been mounted, but do we have the technology to track hackers? In the developed world, regardless of how long it takes, hackers are caught.

We are finding out that we live in the 21st century using 21st century technology but lack the knowledge to effectively manage this technology.
And so we stand accused of mischief.

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Cyber crimes are here

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