How cyber criminals hack into businesses

. Discuss two ways technology has changed human behavior in the past 20 years. Use specific examples.

Technology has impacted human behavior in a litany of ways. First, it has contributed to increased productivity and efficiencies for both businesses and customers. Technology has also allowed the company to grow at a much more rapid pace through innovations. Microsoft and Google are common exampled of how technology has changed human behavior. Routine and mundane tasks have now become automated. This automation has caused businesses to become much more efficient with certain activities. The time saving resulting from these efficiencies results in increased profits, higher margins, and a better work environment. Human behavior has changed as they can now focus on much more complex tasks that cannot be solved by a computer. These task are often value-added tasks that help to provide much more value to the business as oppose to the more routine tasks.

One of the more controversial elements of technology relate to its impact on social relationships. Here, many argue that technology has been a detriment to face-to-face interactions. The advent of social media, online group chats, and video gaming has created a community that shuns human interactions. This lack of interaction has created a often divided social construct where individuals are more much visceral in their dialogue. Individuals, who can hide behind a computer screen and are often anonymous can engage if very offensive dialogue on online forums. Studies have show that this negative and offensive language, particularly for young children can have an adverse impact on them later in life. For example, cyber bullying has been shown to contribute to higher rates of suicide and depression (Hinduja, 2013).

Social media has also changed human behavior over the past 20 years as well. Here, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, allow market participants to bend the rules of reality in their favor. Here many individuals attempt to show a lifestyle which they believe others will find favorable even if it does not represent reality. Here, studies have shown the individuals often lie about their own lives on social media to attract attention. This attention seeking leads people to value themselves based on other opinions of them. This ultimately dilutes the value of individuality as everyone is looking to be the same thing to everyone. In this instances, women will show sexy photos of themselves to validate their appearance to me. Instagram in particularly is littered with women only showing their chest and rear end to appease men. Likewise, the men are looking to show wealth and power and therefore look to show items of value. These items include money, cars, women, and vacations. Often both are simply faked or scripted in order to gain public approval. This ultimately undermines the individuality present in other human beings and makes people shallow as it relates to material items.

2. Explain what subcultures are and how the growth of the internet has affected how members of subcultures communicate.

A subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the parent culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political, and sexual matters. In this instance subculture examples include goths, emo, geeks, and so forth. The internet has allowed this subcultures to find their place of acceptance within their own communities. This is a benefit of the internet as likeminded individuals can share their thoughts, ideas, and notions without reprimand. From a negative standpoint, these groups can also be detrimental if they are used to help promote activities that can harm civilization or society overall. We realized this over the past election cycle as the white supremacist’s subculture used the internet to help plan a siege on the capital. In addition, this group use social media to help attract member to their destructive and racists ways.

Look at online news articles to find three recent (2015 or later) examples of cybercrimes. For each example:

1. Explain what happened and identify what kind of cybercrime it is.

According to recent reports, cyber security threats are increasing throughout the world. These threats are predominantly caused by higher internet access by countries across the world. As advances continue in technology, the threat of cybercrime is exacerbated. The articles I examined were all related to computer hackers stealing personal information from businesses. Over the past few years, cyber security has been a major issues for retailers. Many of the retailers that experience cybercrimes were large and established market leaders within their respective fields. Due to the overall size of their organization, the cybercrimes committed exposed how even the most established organizations are subject to attacks. In each of the retailer’s case, a hacker used vendor log on data to steal sensitive data and corporate emails (Winter, 2014). In other instances, the perpetrated used weaknesses with the retailer’s network to extract sensitive data (Vijayan, 2014). The massive data breach at Target last month may have resulted partly from the retailer\\\\\\\'s failure to properly segregate systems handling sensitive payment card data from the rest of its network (Vijayan, 2014). Despite the efforts of retailers to avoid and mitigate the influence of cyber-attacks, they are still occurring with much more regularity and frequency.

2. Identify the digital evidence used in the investigation.

The evidence used in the investigation were interviews, surveillance reports, system analysis, and social media investigations. As it relates to the Target breach, investigators found that hackers used a stolen username and password from Fazio Mechanical Services, a vendor who provide HVAC and refrigeration’s servers to Target. Through forensic investigations the company was able to pinpoint the entry point of malware that was used on the Target point of sale system. This was accomplished as forensic analysts can detect a data breach but not the specific individual who conducted it.

3. Apply a criminological theory to explain why the crime may have been committed.

Akers’ social learning theory is a general theory of crime can be used to help describe the reasoning why individuals commit cybercrime. Here, Akers uses four fundamental concepts to describe the rationale behind the behaviors of cyber criminals. These concepts are differential association, definitions, differential reinforcement, and imitation (Burruss et al., 2012). The first concept of association is heavy related to cybercrime. Here, the anonymity and lack of oversight allows many cyber criminals to engage in the activity. As others see the lack of repercussions and the difficulty of keeping up with changing technology, they too engage in the behavior.

Part 3

The FBI suspects that the motor vehicle registration records in three states have been hacked and that the data is being used to create false identities for a variety of thefts and fraud. The FBI has identified a suspect to be investigated. The suspect has both home and office computers as well as a cell phone and an unspecified number of USB drives.

1. What federal laws should be relied upon to investigate this crime?

The Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – This act prohibits the access of protected computers with authorization with the intend to do harm or to use the information in malicious ways.

The Electronic Communication Protection Act – This act helps protect store information on servers and databases.

2. Explain the process for obtaining warrants that will be needed to conduct a search and the evidence these warrants might need to seize.

A search warrant may be issued to search a computer or electronic media if there is probable cause to believe that the media contains or is contraband, evidence of a crime, fruits of crime, or an instrumentality of a crime. For more information. The process is somewhat different from traditional means as cyber warrants must focus on content as oppose to the physical storage media.