Cybercrime Pays
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Cybercrime Pays
Cybercrime is a combination of criminal acts in dealing with networks and computers and traditional criminal acts conducted through the internet. For example, credit card account thefts, and internet fraud among others are considered cybercrimes when they are committed and illegal through the use of internet and computers. Cyber crimes affect financial integrity of businesses besides other real and damaging effects (Wall, 47).
Understanding the causes and effects of cybercrime helps in employing the necessary measures to reverse its impacts. In this form of crime, a computer or its network serves as the location, target and source of the activity. The different types of cybercrime revolve around hacking by outside parties thereby giving users and the public a wrong sense of security that prompts them to divulge sensitive information.
Cybercrime on a business leads to loss of revenue because it might be in the form of an external party obtaining sensitive information in regards to finance that enables her or him to make financial withdrawals from an organization. The e-commerce environment of a business can also become compromised making it impossible to use. It leads to wastage of time because information technology personnel have to divert the useful resource of time trying to handle hacking incidences. This is a time wastage process because the information technology experts could have spent the time in productive activities.
Compromised customer records because of breaches in security lead to destruction of the reputation of the company or organization. Customers whose credit cards have been hacked tend to lose confidence in the affected companies thereby taking their business elsewhere. Since an organization must implement measures aimed at countering the effects of cybercrime, it reduces the productivity of employees. This is because employees must enter strong passwords as security measures besides other time consuming acts instead of spending time in productive activities.
Human beings engage in criminal activities within organizations when rate of return on investment and chance of loss are inversely related. On the part of cyber criminals, they continue committing this crime because to them, it is profitable to steal financial information. Cybercrime is caused by history in that the introduction of personal computer technology prompted engagement in illegal hacking activities (Brenner, 100).
This was done for purposes of improving system knowledge, testing system abilities and competition on which the best hacker was. Therefore, the processes such as intrusions into different systems did not pose any threat to security. Besides, viruses and worms became more disruptive leading to slow rate of computer operations though it was not to the level that could have made it criminal. This led to exploitation of the skills they had developed and eventual victimization of the society.
In the recent past, there has been increase in information technology security breaches used to deceive and steal. A new breed of cyber criminals have been encouraged by the skills learned previously and not ego or technological advancements. What teens previously did to boast to their friends and to make a comfortable living has evolved into a crime. Cybercrime requires no investment making it easy for even school going children who have little or no finance. Cyber criminals operate remotely and this poses little interference from law enforcers. This makes it easy for cyber criminals to commit crimes besides not having to deal with competing groups.
Cybercrime is big and the criminals have ease of entry because of very little competition. Different groups of cyber criminals collaborate to improve skills and abilities thereby enabling them to seek out new opportunities. This crime is hard to fight using traditional methods because it is open source and law enforcement agencies only rely on internal procedures and defined regulations to fight against this form of crime. Tactics and technology of cyber criminals change faster than the law enforcement agencies can adopt making it a hard situation to contain (Moore, 117).
Therefore, instead of protecting kids from online activities, it is important to protect the internet against children and other people who might abuse it. Department of Justice categorizes cybercrime into a computer as a target used to spread viruses, computer as a weapon for committing crimes and computer as an accessory to store stolen information. This variation makes it hard to counter the effects of cyber crimes.
Alleged computer crimes are mostly committed by kids who do not need to have skills to commit such crimes. Tools for hacking are readily available in the internet thereby increasing the population of criminals. Most of the criminals are kids who do not realize that what they are doing is criminal and they hang out with hackers on the internet who encourage them to do inappropriate crimes online. Some of the biggest problems in cybercrime are wireless networking technology, password cracking, fake websites and SPAM. Some of the main reasons for hacking by criminals who hack are financial gain, revenge, protest, popularity, mischief, theft, forgery and criminality.
Computer viruses generate havoc on a computer system thereby costing companies millions in repair. Since viruses appear through