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Cyber Crime in South Africa – Hacking, cracking, and other unlawful online activities
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http://go.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/2009_1/snail
Journal of Information, Law & Technology
Cyber Crime in South Africa – Hacking, cracking, and other unlawful online activities
Sizwe Snail
Attorney at Law
Couzyn Hertzog & Horak
SizweS@couzyn.co.za
This is a refereed article published on 28 May 2009.
Citation: Snail, S., ‘Cyber Crime in South Africa – Hacking, cracking, and other unlawful online activities’, 2009(1) Journal of Information, Law & Technology (JILT), <http://go.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/2009_1/snail>
Abstract
This paper aims to give a broad overview of how South African law dealt with Cyber Crime from a common law perspective and also the new cyber crime provisions in the Electronic Communications Transactions Act, Act 25 of 2002. The paper focuses on the statutory defined crimes and then also gives provisions on the value and evidential weight of electronic data during criminal proceedings. The paper also covers the powers of ‘Cyber inspectors’ as well as discusses how the ECT has given our South African Court’s broader jurisdiction when adjudicating Cybercrimes due to its borderless nature. The Article concludes with some brief comparative law from the EU and US and concluding remarks.
1. Introduction
Computer crime or commonly referred to as Cyber Crime or ICT Crime (van der Merwe, 2008, p.61) is a new type of criminal activity which started showing its ugly head in the early 90’s as the Internet became a common place for online users worldwide. This is due to the fact that computer criminals now have the opportunity to gain access to sensitive information if they possess the necessary know-how. This generally causes huge problems in the economic sphere and results in companies and individuals having to take costly steps to ensure their safety and reduction in commission of cyber-crime (Gordon, 2000, p.423). Cyber crime or also known as computer crime can be defined as any criminal activity that involves a computer and can be divided into two categories .One, it deals with crimes that can only be committed which were previously not possible before the advent of the computer such as hacking, cracking, sniffing and the production and decimation of malicious code (Ibid) The other category of computer crimes are much wider and have been in existence for centuries but are now committed in the cyber environment such as internet fraud, possession and distribution of child pornography to name a few. It is clear from the above that ICT crime has to be tackled with a more sophisticated multi-disciplinary approach (van der Merwe, 2008, p.61). In modern times there is more focus from protecting the ‘container’ of valuables ( the computer is merely the modern equivalent of a bank vault ), only instead of money or gold it contains data ) to protecting the real valuables in most ICT crimes, namely the data contained in the computer , the cell phone’s GPS device and so on. (van der Merwe, 2008, p.63). The question then usually arises as to what types of criminal offences may be committed online and what laws one must apply to charge an offender to successfully get a prosecution.
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