Computer Fraud

David Smith was a 30 year old male that created the “Melissa Virus”. The virus was visual basic for applications based worm. He purposely planted this deadly virus to alt.sex newsgroup which was from a stolen AOL account. It was said that he named this virus after meeting a stripper in Florida. He delivered this deadly virus to evade anti-virus software and to infect computers that were using word or Microsoft documents. The Melissa virus showed up March 26, of 1999 as an email from a friend or colleague. After the virus went viral it went out to 50 computers which then infected 50 more and so on. It was moving fast and spreading like wildfire if not worse. Many of the main companies such as Microsoft, lucent technologies and Intel had to forcefully shut down their email to gateways because how fast this virus was spreading. Today the Melissa is still very popular and known as the most costly outbreak to happen, costing over $400 Million in damages to North America businesses. David was one of the first to be prosecuted for writing his own virus. The F.B.I. caught him by tracing the internet access provider that was used to send out the Melissa virus. It had infected over 100,000 worldwide at this point. He was sentenced 20 months in federal prison plus $5,000 in fines. He was also ordered to spend three years of supervised release after he completed his sentence in Federal Prison. He later came to work for the F.B.I. to help out with hackers.

Vladimir Levin was a 23 year old male that was sentenced three years in jail for illegally transferring money to different parts of the world. At the time the media said that Levin was a mathematician and had a degree in biochemistry. In 1994 Levin had accessed accounts from Citibank customers via dual-up wire transfer service and transferred the money to accounts that had been set up by accomplices in Germany, Israel, United States, Finland, and The Netherlands. Three of the accomplices were arrested attempting to...