Email Hacking Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Email Hacking - Essay Example Accordingly, the more technically trained and informed people are in the position to not only subjugate the rights of others but also offend their rights. The technology-savvy people can easy use the Internet to hack into the computer systems so that they can steal money, infect others’ computers with viruses, and change information in their private profiles. Emails are frequently used for business transactions these days. People use email to share vital information with one another. Hacking of an email account can yield disastrous results for the account owner and not many people are quite technically skilled enough to recover their email accounts after they have been hacked. This paper discusses several ways in which email accounts can be hacked and the ethical and legal implications of hacking. If an individual is aware of the potential ways in which he/she can be fooled, he/she can take the preventive measures in time to overcome such threats and has fair chances of escapi ng the attack by the offender. Issues in Email Hacking Ethical issues According to the Hacker Manifesto, a hacker commits only one crime which is the crime of curiosity (Trodick, 2011). Levy (2010) identified sex tenets to exemplify the ethics of hacker; according to the first tenet, â€Å"access to computers - and anything which might teach you about the way the world works- should be unlimited and total† (Levy, 2010, p. 23) whereas according to the second tenet, â€Å"all information should be free† (Levy, 2010, p. 24). The hacker ethic is a belief that the sharing of information is a very positive and powerful good. It implies that hackers assume the ethical responsibility to share the expertise they have by enhancing the access to information, writing open-source, and computing all possible resources. There exists a belief that if system is cracked for the purposes of exploration or fun, it is ethically justified till the time the attacker does not commit any vanda lism, theft, or a breach of confidentiality. Every time an individual accesses a system in an unauthorized manner, he/she acts unethically. Ethics varies from one individual to another. Ethics cannot be completely defined by one individual so that a certain action can be deemed right or wrong. Nevertheless, in the democratic system that prevails in the society, every individual’s right to security of privacy and property is acknowledged. This privacy covers the information stored by people on their personal computers or the computers that they are authorized to use. â€Å"The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the 'right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures’† (Head, 2012). The Fourth Amendment is interpreted generally as an individual’s right to privacy, though such right cannot be stated explicitly. Nevertheless, every individual in the US says that he/she has a fundamental privacy right of their possessions, though hackers disagree with this. Legal Issues The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 illegalized the unauthorized access to computer or stealing of the information that is related to credit card or private government (teamidesign.com, n.d.). According to Section 3, gaining unauthorized access to the government computers is illegal. On the other hand, the hackers argue that as long as they do not take