What a Cyber Crime Is

In one line

"Cyber crime" is not defined in any Indian statute, does not appear as a heading in the Act, and is best understood by asking two questions of a fact pattern: what did the computer do, and who was harmed.

The definition problem

Search the Information Technology Act, 2000, for the words "cyber crime" and you will not find them. Chapter XI is headed "Offences". Section 2 defines "cyber security", "cyber cafe" and "cyber terrorism" through section 66F, but not cyber crime.

Nor is it in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, except in one place worth noting: section 111, organised crime, whose definition of a continuing unlawful activity includes "cyber-crimes" among the listed activities, without defining the term.

The Budapest Convention avoids the phrase too. It creates four groups of offences and never calls them cyber crime. Chapter 590.

Why the absence matters. A term with no legal definition cannot be an element of an offence, so nothing turns on whether a given act "is" a cyber crime. The classification is an aid to analysis and to answering examination questions, not a legal test. An answer should say so at the start, and then give the classification anyway, because that is what is being asked for.

The working definition usually given is a crime in which a computer, computer system, computer network or computer resource is the target, the instrument, or an incidental repository of evidence.

The first classification: what the computer did

This is the classification that actually decides which section applies. Every classification of cyber crime in the textbooks starts here, because the role the machine played is what sends a lawyer to one statute rather than another.

The computer as a target. The offence is against the machine or its contents. Nothing analogous existed before computers, so these needed new law. Unauthorised access, damage, contamination, denial of service, and tampering with source code.

The provisions: section 43 read with section 66, section 65 for source code, section 66F for cyber terrorism, section 70 for a protected system. Chapters 1100, 1170, 1180, 1320 and 780.

The computer as instrument. The offence is an old one committed by new means. Cheating, defamation, obscenity, extortion, forgery, theft of trade secrets, harassment. The conduct was criminal before computers; the computer changed only its speed, reach and anonymity.

The provisions: sections 66C, 66D, 66E, 67, 67A and 67B of the Act; and sections 318, 319, 351, 356 and the rest of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. Chapters 1200, 1210, 1220, 1230 and 1280.

The computer as evidence. The offence has nothing to do with computers at all, and a computer holds the proof: a murder planned by message, a bribe recorded in a spreadsheet. There is no cyber crime here and no provision of the Act applies, but the whole of the electronic evidence law does. Chapter 1270.