A cybercrime, in its broadest definition, could be considered to be any crime committed through the medium of a computer or other relevant information technologies. The link between these crimes is that they all exist outside what could be considered material existence, and inside a brave new cyber world. The Information Age – that is the integration of information technologies into virtually every aspect of business and society – is posing new challenges to law enforcement, here and abroad.

Although humans have created cyberspace and are continually expanding it, the real inhabitants are data, information, ideas, and knowledge. This is the Information or Knowledge Age. The real estate, or property, is intellectual and public. No one “owns” it, or operates it with any central authority.

Politically, it makes governments obsolete. Economically, it can be replicated at zero cost, and unlike an industrial economy where you can only consume so many widgets, the average person in an information economy taps into all the world’s knowledge and consumes information as fast as possible.

The global network, which has united millions of computers located in different countries and opened broad opportunities to obtain and exchange information, is used with criminal purposes more and more often. The introduction of electronic money and virtual banks, exchanges and shops has become one of the factors of the appearance of a new kind of crime – transnational computer crimes. Today law enforcement faces tasks of counteraction and investigation of crimes in the sphere of computer technologies – cybercrimes.

Still the definition of cybercrime remains unclear to law enforcement, though such criminal actions pose great social danger. Their transnational character gives the grounds to say that development of a mutual policy to regulate main problems should be a part of every strategy to fight cybercrime.

One of the best weapons against technology crimes is technology. The IT industry is hard at work, developing hardware and software to help prevent and detect network intrusions. Third-party security products are available in abundance to prevent cybercriminals from invading our system. Monitoring and auditing packages allow IT professionals to collect detailed information to assist in detecting suspicious activities. Many of these packages include notification features that can alert network administrators as soon as a breach occurs.

Cyberspace law is a patchwork of loosely-articulated protections, liberally punctuated with loopholes and exceptions. Imagine that there is privacy protection for bank records but not for medical records; protection for videotape rentals, but not magazine subscriptions; credit record protection, but not insurance records. New business practices and new technological developments often make good laws obsolete. It’s no wonder that cyberspace is the perfect breeding ground for crime as cyberlaw is such a mess.

By and large, it is submitted that cybercrime should be subject to a global principle of public policy that aims at combating and preventing such organized crimes through raising global awareness and increasing literacy rates, coordinating legislative efforts on national, regional and global levels, and establishing a high-level global network of cooperation between national, regional, and international enforcement agencies and the police.