As cyber space has kept on expanding, there have been significant changes in cyber crimes as well. However, the nature and types of cyber crimes have not been discussed in detail yet. There are several factors that make it difficult to conceptualize cyber crimes. For one thing, there is a lack of researches on occurrence of the cyber crimes involving information technology. For another, there is no standard that can categorize the cases according to their characteristics. In particular, with the information technologies being evolved, such as computer system and networks, cyberculture is changing and it causes crime types to change too rapidly for working level staffs and scholars to follow. This leads the laws regulating cyber crimes to be unsystematic. On the one hand, various kinds of laws and regulations are applied to same behavior in overlap to create risks of additional punishment and to be likely to disturb legal applications. On the other hand, new types of cyber crimes have not been regulated due to the lack of laws to apply despite needs of the punishment. The purpose of this study is to examine cyber crimes and associated laws and regulations longitudinally and to investigate new types of current cyber crimes horizontally and to examine the crime more carefully and to give political directions.
At first, the study described the development of cyber crimes and the related laws and regulations chronologically from early 2000s, when cyber space was first activated, to 2009. The Criminal Act, the main law regulating the phenomena of crimes in Korea, has not paid its attention to the new types of cyber crimes since its major revision in 1995. Instead, the special law of ‘Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, etc.’ played a vital role in regulating cyber crimes. The intense diversification in cyber crimes led this act to be revised more than twenty times within that timeframe.
From the horizontal view this study examined not just problems regarding cyber crimes in Korea, but also the recent trend of cyber crimes in the United States and Europe and their criminal political measures to them. It took a closer look at the latest cases, evidential procedures and legal provisions in the United States and legal provisions in Europe, especially in EU, Germany, the UK and France. This is because the United States has been developing flexible norms of cyber crimes through the judicial precedents and making progress especially in evidential procedures regarding cyber crimes. In Europe there has been the more advancements in legal regulations on cyber crimes than in Korea. This is a result from the fact that a lot of cyber crime related phenomena occurred in the UK galvanized many european countries to enact agreed laws and each country adopted them.
As stated above, it is very difficult to effectively tackle cyber crimes because they are consistently evolving and changing with the developments in cyberculture. However, it needs to be noted that ‘Code’ can be the most useful weapon in the battle with cyber crimes. Thereafter, we need to educate citizens about cyber crimes so that the damage from people’s ignorance of cyber crimes can be reduced. Furthermore, the various cyber crime-related provisions need to be unified, referring to the examples of foreign countries' legislative works. This will enhance the general preventive function of norms. To make sure that anyone who commits cyber crimes must be captured, a number of efforts need to be made to improve investigatory powers, such as developing forensic techniques, cooperating with people in cyber space, companies and outside research institutes.