1. Introduction: The Hacker Advantage 3 the physicality of stealing in the real world creates logistical barriers that complicates committing crimes. But in cyberspace, all the assets are digital. This means it is trivial to move cyberspace artifacts from any point A to any point B over the Internet. There are few logistical barriers to stealing digital assets from an online bank. This is also true for intellectual property, personal information, and every other kind of data stored in cyberspace. All it takes is just a few keystrokes to move enormous bank account balances or volumes of intellectual property from one computer to another in cyberspace. Plus, the actors in cyberspace are also digital. To rob a bank in the real world, a person must put himself in physical danger. Bank robbers have to worry about getting shot or attacked. This visceral sense of danger is an effective deterrent because it forces criminals to risk life and limb to commit crime. Robbing an online bank, however, contains no physical danger. When a person steals cyberspace assets, they are not physically present at the scene of the crime. For this reason, the personas of cyber criminals are much more daring than their physical world counterparts. Therefore, the fact that cyberspace is a digital world makes it easier to commit crime, and it makes the bad guys more fearless, further emboldening them. 1.3 Dynamic Cyberspace is also a dynamic world. The terrain of physical space is mostly static. In most cases the locations of landmarks today are the same as they were hundreds of years ago. Maps are accurate and reliable. But cyber terrain is shifting constantly and maps do not exist. Computers come online and go offline all of the time, they change where they connect to the Internet, and even the same computer might have multiple different human operators. If a computer has been hacked, even its rightful owner may not know who all of those operators are! This means that it is relatively easy for a cyber attacker to cover his tracks and remain hidden in the shadows of cyberspace. It is much easier to become a cyber ninja than a real life ninja. Attackers just need to learn a few tricks of the hacking trade, and they can become anonymous online, or at least maintain plausible deniability. The fact that cyberspace is a dynamic world makes it difficult to answer basic investigative questions like who did what, when, where, and how. This allows attackers to act with a sense of impunity, making them even more audacious.
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