Legal Implications Of Cybercrime In Malaysia | A Case Study

Introduction to the Case Study

In the following case, two people have been accused for committing heinous crimes related to the cyber world. The accused according to case are the blogger Ronnie who has been accused of spreading pornographic content through his blog and the ambitious but inexperienced hacker Wong, who had been spreading unauthorized emails in the entire country of Malaysia asking random people for money in exchange of teaching hacking procedures unbeknownst to him.

The discussion about legal implications that are applicable in both the cases can be listed as below in order:

Legal Implications of Pornographic content in blogs: Although, blogging supports the freedom of speech for any person through their personal website, it does not support having obscene contents except when the blog website permits it (Olesen 2016). There are various laws implemented by different countries about the posting of obscene and pornographic content in blogs and website. In addition, the blog website hosts also have terms of services regarding the use of these websites to spread pornographic and obscene contents (Lin and Nomikos 2018). Secondly, it is to be identified if the contents of the post are protected by the 1^st Amendment law according to the country the website is developed and accessed in. In this case study, the blogger accessed the website and operated in Malaysia (Keyser 2017). Therefore, according to the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 and the MSC Bill of Guarantees, all the kinds of obscene and pornographic content in the contents of the blogs or websites are a punishable offense (Kirwan, Fullwood and Rooney 2018). In Malaysia, even the possession of pornographic or obscene content which is against the public decency is prohibited. Thus, there is a strict law clarifying the penalization of the possession or posting of any pornographic content described under Section 292 of the Penal Code (Bossler, Holt & Seigfried-Spellar 2017). The law also describes that the accused can end up in jail and/or fined up to an amount of 10,000 RM (Yar 2018). In this case as well, Ronnie can be accused with all the legal implications discussed above before finding out if he was really responsible of committing the crimes. This is to clarify that the crimes that has been committed apparently by Ronnie, was not at all his fault as his account was hacked with the joint partnership of Wong and Rosokov (Sullins 2017). Therefore, they are more liable to these penalties with the addition of the hacking into unauthorized blogs and posting on Ronnie’s website without his knowledge (Ghernaouti-Helie 2016).

Legal Implications of sending phishing emails: In this case, Wong was under the impression that Rosokov intended on teaching him the hacking procedures, however, he was not aware of the evil intentions of Rosokov. In order to teach Wong a way to hack in an unauthorized website, Rosokov had knowingly barged into a Wong’s email and had sent many Malaysian emails from Wong’s email address saying that “You Can Hack Your Girlfriend / Boyfriend’s FB Account. But nothing is Free!”

Legal Implications of Pornographic Content in Blogs

Mostly, emails like this are phishing techniques and without Wong’s knowledge, Rosokov had sent phishing emails to different people in Malaysia. Although, this was still to be proved and all the legal implications for sending out phishing emails to the random people in Malaysia would still hold Wong as an accused (Wingard and Pascual 2018). According to the Computer Crime Act 1997 Section 3, accessing the email addresses for unauthorized personnel and without their consent is illegal and under Section 2 Subsection 5, it can be penalized heavily (Ryan 2018).

Geographical barriers forms many loopholes wild implying the cyber laws since geographical differences often clash among different countries. In the following case study it can be seen that the cybercrimes that have taken place including cyber phishing and unethical hacking have spread all over wide span of the continents of Asia and Europe. Both of these countries have different cyber laws although they are more or less the similar (Sani, Ahmad and Wahid 2016). Both for Cyber phishing and posting of pornographic content over website are prohibited in the countries but since the attackers and the victims belong in different continents it is difficult to imply the cyber laws spanning such a wide area.

Rosokov belongs to the continent of Europe who has been the main culprit for both the crimes of posting pornographic content by hacking into unauthorized website and for cyber phishing by hacking on another unauthorized email account (Mubarak 2015). However, both these victims belong to the continent of Asia whereas the attacker belongs to the continent of Europe.

Challenges and gaps that stops the laws to be implemented: There are several challenges in the system that prohibit the laws to be implied on the attacker, who is Rosokov. These can be listed as follows:

• Issues regarding determination of the attack location: The primary problem is the location of the crime committed. Rosokov belongs to the continent of Europe and the attacks have taken place in the continent of Asia, specifically in the country of Malaysia (Fernandez and Pangalangan 2015). Therefore, it is a huge setback by the implied cyber laws that the place of the attacks, that is Malaysia, would be selected as the core location from where the laws would be implied (Brittingham 2017). Nevertheless, the attacks have been orchestrated from the country of Estonia, Europe. This is a major issue and challenge to place charges since the law enforcement agency or the court only has access over the geographical location where the crimes took place and only has authority over that particular geographical area (Alazab and Broadhurst 2015). Therefore, Malaysian court cannot press charges on Rosokov, who resides in a different continent altogether but who is also the chief culprit.
• Jurisdiction of Malaysia and Europe: As the court and authority of Malaysia cannot have access over the attacker who resides in another continent, in the same way the European courts cannot reach out to the Malaysian courts to state that Rosokov would get penalized for his crimes according to Malaysian law while residing in Europe (Choi et al. 2018). This thus forms a great challenge, which might has a chance of mitigation if only European court is informed about the misdeeds of Rosokov by the Malaysian court and European court decides to hand him over to Asian law enforcement team against cybercrime or court.

References

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Brittingham, B.W., 2017. Cybercrime: An In-Depth Study into the Challenges and Impediments to Conducting Criminal Investigations in the Cyber Domain (Doctoral dissertation, Utica College).

Choi, Y.S., He, S., Zhuang, Y., Lee, G.M., Leung, C.M.A. and Whinston, A.B., 2018, June. Information disclosure and security policy design: a large-scale randomization experiment in Pan-Asia. In 17th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2018).

Fernandez, G.B. and Pangalangan, R.L.A., 2015. Spaces and Responsibilities: A Review of Foreign Laws and an Analysis of Philippine Laws on Intermediary Liability. Phil. LJ, 89, p.761.

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Kirwan, G.H., Fullwood, C. and Rooney, B., 2018. Risk factors for social networking site scam victimization among Malaysian students. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 21(2), pp.123-128.

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Sani, M.A.M., Ahmad, M.Z. and Wahid, R., 2016. Freedom of the Internet in Malaysia. The Social Sciences, 11(7), pp.1343-1349.

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