Cybercrime ranges across a spectrum of activities. At one end are crimes that involve fundamental breaches of personal or corporate privacy, such as assaults on the integrity of information held in digital depositories and the use of illegally obtained digital information to blackmail a firm or individual. Also at this end of the spectrum is the growing crime of identity theft. Midway along the spectrum lie transaction-based crimes such as fraud, trafficking in child pornography, digital piracy, money laundering, and counterfeiting. These are specific crimes with specific victims, but the criminal hides in the relative anonymity provided by the Internet. Another part of this type of crime involves individuals within corporations or government bureaucracies deliberately altering data for either profit or political objectives.
At the other end of the spectrum are those crimes that involve attempts to disrupt the actual workings of the Internet. These range from spam, hacking, and denial of service attacks against specific sites to acts of cyber terrorism—that is, the use of the Internet to cause public disturbances and even death. Cyberterrorism focuses upon the use of the Internet by non-state actors to affect a nation's economic and technological infrastructure. Since the September 11 attacks of 2001, public awareness of the threat of cyberterrorism has grown dramatically.
