Busn420 Cyber Crimes in Business

BUSN420 Business Law

Week 6 April 7, 2012

Cyber Crimes in Business

Computers are an integral part of a business’s daily operations and strategic plan. With each day the use of computers in the workplace increases. More tasks are being automated, and computers exist today where they didn’t 10 years ago. Crime perpetrated against businesses that use computers is known as electronic crime, or cyber-crime. These are crimes where individual computers or networks of computers are attacked by nefarious felons for the purposes of stealing money, proprietary information, or personal identities. Many traditional crimes such as theft, blackmail, forgery, embezzlement, and fraud are today perpetrated via the internet using computers.

Cyber crimes that are carried out over the internet are (Merritt):

Fraud; a deceptive misrepresentation of fact sent with the intention of persuading another individual to do, or refrain from doing, something that will lead to a loss for the individual.

Offensive Content; transmitting obscene and offensive information and communications via the internet including explicit stories and scenes of child pornography.

Spam; unsolicited junk email sent for commercial purposes for the intention of flooding a personal email inbox. Excessive spam email has the capability to completely impair a business’s email server which could lead to loss or revenue or injury. A denial-of-service attack is a flood of spam messages sent to slow down a company’s servers to the point where they either crash or are rendered useless.

Harassment; Derogatory comments directed toward a group or individuals or specific persons that focus on race, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation. Hate speech, in other words. Harassment typically takes place in internet chat rooms but easily translates over to email and telephone.

Terrorism; the Internet has become a forum for terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and individual homegrown...