Cyber Crimes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Cyber Crimes - Essay Example The first of these that will be discussed is that of piracy. Although piracy has traditionally been viewed as a problem that is specific to a young generation of music down loaders and video game players, the fact of the matter is that the market for software, video, music, and data piracy has exploded within recent years and is a multi-billion dollar a year loss for the industries whose intellectual rights are being infringed upon. Moreover, if the firm in question is one that distributes or creates a software product, their overall revenues are in dire danger of being lowered as a result of the actions of pirates. Likewise, the firm must be aware of the fact that software piracy usually takes place from within first as an unscrupulous employee having access to the information in question usually is responsible for taking this information home on their own and uploading it to any number of a host of sites as a means of beginning the snow-ball effect of data piracy. As such, one of t he ways in which a firm can seek to ameliorate the way in which it is exposed to the risk of software piracy is to ensure that all data movements within the firm are well tracked as well as having a robust legal department that operates in close concert with the human resources department to ensure that limited numbers of the employees have access to the finished product and those that do are well accounted for and have been explained to the ramifications, both ethical and criminal, with relation to stealing the company’s product. Secondly, if the firm itself is not one that relies on the development of software as a means to earn its revenues, the firm will need to be responsible for the ways in which its employees download and utilize the data that they might find on the internet. For this reason, a robust internet usage policy must be delineated to the employees upon their employment and watch groups should be established to ensure that compliance is met at every step of t he process. The second issue that relates to cyber crimes is that of cyber terrorism. Although this is of course a lower level incidence than the one that has been thus far mentioned, it is of primary importance not only to governmental instruments but to the very foundations of a nation’s economy. Therefore, the threat of cyber terrorism can include any and all firms that deal with an entire litany of different industries and/or businesses. In order to guard against the threat of cyber terrorism, it should be the goal of the firms in question to seek to review their security policies in dept on a quarterly and yearly basis as a means of ensuring that key oversights are addressed and no blatant flaws are exhibited in their systems. Even though it is never possible to ensure that a given firm will be 100% secure from cyber terrorism, the engagement of key assets to review the security procedures is integral in protecting the firm from such an eventuality. Finally, this analysi s will discuss the threat of fraud. This is perhaps the easiest of the three to seek to prevent as it involves the instruction of shareholders with regards to how to interpret threats that present themselves on a daily basis. Furthermore, with respect to fraud, this is almost always the type of situation in which employee lack of knowledge