3.1 Cyber Stalking and Law
1. In general, cyberstalking has been described as online stalking. In other words, it is a misuse of technology in harassing someone and specifically the internet. Some of the most common cyberstalking crimes include false accusations, threats, monitoring, data manipulation or destructions, and identity theft. Although these activities may take different forms, the common denominator is that they are criminal offenses, unwanted, illegal, and often obsessive in nature. The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 is one of the legislation or law that governs these cyberstalking crimes. According to this Act, such criminal activities curtails individual freedom and thus, they have to be constantly careful. This Act provides two offenses of stalking which are in Section 2A and 4A. Although these offenses are not retrospective, they provide alternative options to the prosecutors when making charges. Federal law is one of the tools that has been wide to curb cyber-crimes such as stalking.
2. According to the Section 18 of U.S.C. 875(c) of the federal law, cyberstalking is a federal crime and is punishable by up to a fine of $250,000 and five years in prison. This law covers any online communication in foreign commerce or interstate transmission that tends to threaten, monitor or manipulate data of another person. Further, Section 875 applies to the stalking done via e-mail, the internet, and the telephone. Jake Baker was charged under this statute. Also, there are other forms of cyberstalking crimes that are prosecutable under 47 U.S.C 223. For instance, under this statute, use of phone or any other telecommunication device to abuse, annoy or threaten attracts up to two years’ imprisonment.
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3.3 Cyber Stalker Case Studies
1. Jake Baker Case in December 1994. Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), prosecution of Jake Baker is a general example of a cyberstalking case. Baker was charged with counts of using email to transmit a threat to injure via the internet.
2. In count one, Baker was charged for transmitting three e-mail messages to injure and quote. The second count, the message sent had grammatical, spelling, and typographic errors which were reproduced the count one charges. The third charges amounted to the shorthand for "by the way" as "BTW." In this case, Baker was being prosecuted for the usage of his words which implicated the importance of First Amendment interests under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c).
4.1 Employing Alternative Defenses
1. Basically, DoS method is used to the legitimate users the access to an online service. For instance, an e-commerce website such as a bank. More often, attacks apply the non-trivial amount of computing applications which are common in compromising vulnerable PCs. Thus, they transmit bogus traffic to a site. An alternative defense against DoS is through Internet Service Provider (ISP) and cloud mitigation provider.
2. ISP are often used to provide DoS mitigation. The major reason is that they help large volumetric attacks due to more bandwidth. On the other hand, cloud mitigation provider offers DoS mitigation from cloud. With this, thy build large amounts of network bandwidth to take in all types of network traffic.
4.2 Defending against Specific Denial of Service Attacks
1. On February 28, 2018 GitHub which is a control hosting service provider was hit with a massive DoS attack.
2. Github was knocked offline with traffic hitting the website at a speed of 1.35TB per second. After the analysis, it was noted that the attacked was the product of Mirai botnet malware which was transmitted to the website to manifest thousands od loT devices. As a result, it exploited the servers managing the Memcached memory caching system.
3. In protecting against such an attack I would recommend the deployment of cloud-based and combination of on-premises solution. This will help in handling DoS attacks of varying sizes and types.
