Business Law Cyber Crimes Essay

Cyber crime is an ongoing and growing problem for businesses, for government, and for private individuals throughout the world. This paper identifies the kinds of cyber crime that are threatening computer users, notably businesses. It also proposes strategies that businesses can embrace that will (in many cases) prevent the intrusion of cyber criminals into servers and hard drives.

What particular cyber crimes do businesses / individuals need to be wary of?

An article in the peer-reviewed journal Performance Improvement (Nykodym, et al., 2010) points out -- using FBI data from 2005 -- that computer crimes cost American organizations an estimated $67.2 billion every year. Not all cyber crimes are committed against businesses in order to steal passwords and intrude into servers to re-route financial information or actually seize funds from companies. In fact an FBI update in 2012 reports that the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has received 290,000 complaints from individuals who have been scammed through Internet fraud. A common form of cyber crime that is imposed on individuals is through the use of "scareware" (also called "ransomware").The computer user suddenly sees a pop up that warns of a threat to the computer; it asks the user to purchase antivirus software to knock down the threat.

Cyber crimes in a business setting specifically. As to businesses -- corporations and small businesses too -- there is a great deal to worry about because cyber threats are taking their toll. Nykodym explains that many executives "…overlook computer crime as a serious threat…only 4% of polled executives indicated that cyber crime represented a serious hazard to their business property" (43). But there are serious threats and because of that managers and executives are not the right people to be on top of the threats; the company should have a security expert on board (Nykodym, 44). Investigative journalist Bert Latamore explains that cyber criminals are acquiring business information like "…unannounced quarterly results, engineering and design drawings for new products," and updated business strategies (Latamore, 2010, p. 11). They get this information by using a "bot" (short for….....