Cyber Crime Against Women and Regulations in Australia

8.2. Cyber Harassments

As per our typology discussed in the chapter 2, hacking may constitute a separate gender sensitive cyber crime even if it is not necessarily related to financial crimes. Hacking may lead to various other cyber crimes such as destroying personal information and blocking others to contact the victim, leaving her completely isolated in a cyber - imprisonment state; accessing the individual’s personal and professional information and creating cloned web profiles to impersonate the victim; misusing the information of the female victim(s) including her pictures for illegal financial gains, especially by making her website / public profile look like hard core adult entertainer’s profile; intentionally destroying her professional identity and make her a ‘laughing stock’, etc. As such, these sorts of harassments, which involve hacking, hacking and cloning, hacking and morphing, hacking and impersonation etc, are well controlled by the Federal Criminal Code Act, 1995, as has been amended by Cyber crime Act, 2001.² The Cyber crime Act, 2001 prohibits unauthorized access, modification or impairment of computer data, which is done with intent to commit a serious offence under section 477.1,³ 2, 3, and 4.⁴ However, these provisions are used maximum for preventing crimes against governments and corporations (Smith, Grobosky & Urbas, 2004). We found no literature to show that these provisions have also been used to prevent hacking and hacking related problems targeted towards women.