Challenges of the Knowledge Society (May 2024)
PROPOSALS FOR A BROADER APPROACH OF „MISUSE OF DEVICES AND PROGRAMS” PROVISION IN COMBATING CYBER-DEPENDENT AND CYBER-ENABLED CRIMES
Abstract
The adoption, in 2001, in Budapest, of the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime brought an important step forward in the prevention and combatting cyber-related crimes, through the creation of a special indictment (art. 6) against the production, sale, procurement for use, import, distribution, import or making available of devices, computer programs, passwords or any other such data with the scope to further illegal access to a computer system, interception without right of a computer data transmission, an illegal data interference or an illegal system interference, offences comprised in the art. 2 to 5 of the Convention. Although the offence in art. 6 represents the „mean-crime” in relation with the further commission of the above mentioned crimes against the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer data and systems („purpose-crimes”), the nowadays Cybercrime phenomenon shows that the misuse of the devices and computer programs actually exceeds the legal boundaries of art. 2 to 5, and (technically) impacts much of the other forms of cyber-related or cyber-enabled offences, especially in the FinTech area, electronic payment, blockchain, cryptocurrency etc. Taking into consideration the proliferation of illegal activities against personal information, confidential data or access credentials, especially the commercialization, especially in Dark Web, of codes, passwords, hacking tools, malware and other present or future cutting-edge system interference technologies, thus posing a great danger to the whole cyber-ecosystem, an improvement of art. 6, and of all the correspondent (related) articles in the special laws or the criminal codes adopted by the signatory countries, would contribute to the creation of an extensive and much comprehensive legal tool in the prevention and efficiently combating cybercrimes.
