This paper examines the growing problem of cyber crime as it affects businesses, government agencies, and private individuals. Drawing on FBI data and peer-reviewed research, it identifies key threats such as ransomware, bot-driven spam campaigns, malware downloads, and fake banner advertisements. The paper also highlights the tendency of corporate executives to underestimate cyber risk and argues for dedicated security expertise within organizations. Proposed countermeasures include continuous anti-virus and anti-malware updates, employee behavior restrictions, data encryption, and distributed storage technologies that deny criminals access to complete files even if some devices are compromised.
Cyber crime is an ongoing and growing problem for businesses, government agencies, and private individuals throughout the world. This paper identifies the kinds of cyber crime threatening computer users — notably businesses — and proposes strategies that businesses can embrace to prevent cyber criminals from intruding into their servers and hard drives.
An article in the peer-reviewed journal Performance Improvement (Nykodym, et al, 2010) points out — citing 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 or intrude into servers to reroute financial information. An FBI update from 2012 reports that the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 290,000 complaints from individuals who had been scammed through Internet fraud.
A common form of cyber crime targeting individuals is ransomware (also called "scareware"). The computer user suddenly sees a pop-up warning of a threat to their computer and is prompted to purchase antivirus software to neutralize it.
As for businesses — both corporations and small businesses — there is a great deal to worry about, as cyber threats continue to take 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). Because the threats are serious, managers and executives are not the right people to be solely responsible for addressing them; the company should have a dedicated security expert on board (Nykodym, 44).
Investigative journalist Bert Latamore explains that cyber criminals are acquiring sensitive business information such as "unannounced quarterly results, engineering and design drawings for new products," and updated business strategies (Latamore, 2010, p. 11). They obtain this information by using a "bot" (short for "robot"), which allows thieves to take over company computers. The cyber criminal builds up an inventory of "thousands of bot-infected computers" and from those computers resends spam, making messages appear to come from a legitimate source. When a computer user clicks on one of those links, the bot can allow the criminal to "extort protection money from businesses" (Latamore, p. 12).
"Malware downloads and fake banner ad attacks"
"Encryption and distributed storage as defenses"
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