Computer crime is a growing national and international threat to the continued development of e-business and e-commerce. When the Internet was first created in the late 1960s, the designers intentionally built it to be open and easily accessible. Little did they know 40 years later, that structure would be the very cause of so much crime and vandalism. Table below lists the best known examples of computer crime.
It‘s very difficult for our society and our governments to keep up with the rapid changes in the types of computer crime being committed. Many laws have to be rewritten and many new laws must be implemented to accommodate the changes.
Identity Theft
The fastest growing crime off or on the Internet is identity theft. Even though identity theft is most likely to occur in an offline environment, once your personal information has been stolen it's easy to use it in an online environment.
There are many precautions people can take to help prevent identity theft. One way is to scrutinize emails or phone calls that ask for your personal information or financial account information. No legitimate financial institution will ever send an email requesting you to supply your account information. That is the number one indicator that the email is a phishing email. You should ignore and delete the email immediately.
Click Fraud
All those ads you see on Web sites cost the sponsor money. Every time someone clicks on an ad, the sponsor is charged a pay-per-click fee. The fee is
based on the popularity of the search words that generated the ad. What if your company is paying for an ad with little or no resultant traffic to your Web site? That’s what happens in the case of click fraud. A person or a software program continually hits on the ad, driving up the advertising fees, without any intention of actually visiting the site.