Preventing Deviations in the Digital World by Criminal Law Means

Abstract

Any progress causes both positive influence on society and produces new risks of causing harm to public relations some of which may be criminal. The subject matter of the research is new technologies which may be used to bring harm to public relations protected by criminal law. The purpose of the article is to examine the tool of breaching public relations by applying new technologies and developing adequate criminal law measures to evade deviations in the digital world. The general scholar and social legal methods are implemented in the article. A popular technique of social engineering is fishing aimed at obtaining access to confidential data of the users, logins and passwords. The theft of property of another by means of getting confidential information causes criminal liability under article 3 of the Russian Criminal Code. Fishing letters contain various programs (Trojans). The programs are applied by the guilty when stealing money by providing access to the bank account of the victim etc. Such programs are applied to extort the property of the victim threatening to delete computer information. These actions may be qualified under articles 272 and 273 of the Criminal Code. In authors opinion, Article 163 of the Code should be added with the way of committing the crime, i.e. the threat of deleting information. Similar negative consequences may be caused by DoS attacks. The research studies five most famous cyber attacks, specifies the mechanism of causing harm to the objects of criminal law protection, which needs specification in article 272 and 273 of the Criminal Code. The paper studies the blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and robots. The changes in the civil law regulation of public relations arising due to the technologies in question may cause changes in the criminal law assessment of modern era crimes.