Question

1, When considering government and private reaction to those who spread viruses, be sure to consider both criminal and civil sanctions.

2, Computer viruses can cause havoc when the infection hinders or disables personal or business computers. Naturally, the cost of dealing with viruses impacts major companies whenever an infection occurs and is high in both monetary and manpower expenditures. But even the small businessperson or casual user can experience major inconvenience, anguish, and expense when infected. Does the law deal severely enough with those who spread viruses? Is there anything more that the government could do to protect citizens and businesses that use the Internet that would not be viewed as an invasion of citizens' rights? Now imagine that the next time you went to your personal computer it was useless because of a virus and had to be replaced, or that the next time you went to the computer lab on campus you found that a virus had disabled all computers on your campus for 6 months. Would your answer be different?

Answer 1

Hi , I would like to be glad to give answers of your questions.

No the law is not enough for those who spread viruses. Cyber Crime is not defined in Information Technology Act 2000 nor in the I.T. Amendment Act 2008 nor in any other legislation in India. In fact, it cannot be too. Offence or crime has been dealt with elaborately listing various acts and the punishments for each, under the Indian Penal Code, 1860 and quite a few other legislations too. Hence, to define cyber crime, we can say, it is just a combination of crime and computer.Now IT Amendment Act (ITA-2000) got the President assent on 5 Feb 2009 and was made effective from 27 October 2009.Now a new Section 43-A introduced to deal with compensation for failure to protect data was introduced in the ITAA -2008. But this is not enough . There are lot of sections Section 65 , Sections 66 in ITA which deal with the cyber crime. But still now a days the Computers of a bank or an important person are being hacked through Trojan or a Virus. So I think govt. should be proactive enough to take a prompt action if such incident occurs . Our Govt. should build a strong IT cell where some people who are identified as ethical hacker should be there and continuous monitoring over the network is also necessary without invasion of citizens' rights. Whenever there would be a red alert Govt. should take effective and prompt action before the virus / the cyber crime makes any disaster . And the person who is responsible for this crime should be punished in such a way that he can understand his fault and also another person will think twice to commit such a crime.