The cyberspace was inhabited with junkies but now thugs, abusers and maniacs too are crawling on the superhighway waiting to snare unsuspecting victims.

Apart from unprincipled business rivals, the villainous characters could be the employee you sacked last month or worse, the byte from a disgruntled employee in the next cubicle. Their tools range from pornographic emails, cookie poisoning, to web defacement.

The attacks range from obscene, threatening and defamatory emails to computer-aided sabotage, source code thefts, data theft, unauthorized access and alteration of data, targeted virus attack and the list is growing.

A company is more likely to be cyber-attacked by a former employee rather than a business rivals, states the Computer Crime and Abuse Report (India) 2001-02 published by the computer emergency response team of the Asian School of Cyber Laws.

The report analyses 6,266 incidents of computer crime and abuse that affected 600 organisations in India during 2001 and 2002.

About 34 per cent of the cases came from InfoTech sector, 20 per cent from manufacturing, 14 per cent from insurance, travel, transport and tourism.

The financial sector accounted for 12 per cent of the cases while 8 per cent was from the education sector.

A disgruntled employee is more likely to commit a computer crime with two third of data theft incidents are attributed to employees – current (21 per cent) and former (31 per cent). In 27 per cent of the cases, business rivals were the perpetrators of the crime.

Another worrying development was the damage inflicted by kiddies – those with little knowledge level but putting freely available hacking tools to use and breaking into networks of organization with ease.

They accounted for about eight per cent of the cases.

Data theft incident were the most widespread account for 33 per cent of the overall total reported incidents. Email abuse incidents were second at 22.5 per cent and 18.5 per cent was unauthorized incident and 15 per cent was unauthorized data alternations.

The average cost of a data theft attack is Rs 1.8 lakh, with the cost ranging between Rs 20,000 and Rs 1.87 crore.

In 97 per cent of incidents involving obscene emails, the victims were female employees.And interestingly, the occurrence of a computer crime incident is most likely in September, least likely in August, more likely on a Monday, Friday or Saturday and least likely on a Sunday. But these cases go unreported as it was reported in the study that companies were afraid of the negative.

They are also unsure of the technical capabilities of the police to handle such cases or were not aware of the laws related to computer crime, reports the study.

The Asian School is among the few offering education, training and consultancy in cyber law, cyber crime investigation and information security targeting a cross-section of IT users.