Costly Computer Crimes and Problems

• Unauthorized access and security breaches. Whether from internal or external sources, unauthorized access and security breaches are a top concern of IT managers. These can create havoc with a company’s systems and damage customer relationships. Unauthorized access also includes employees, who can copy confidential new-product information and provide it to competitors or use company systems for personal business that may interfere with systems operation. Another problem is a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) where the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by overwhelming it with excessive traffic.
• Computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses. Viruses can hide for weeks, months, or even years before starting to damage information. To protect data from virus damage, virus protection software automatically monitors computers to detect and remove viruses. Program developers make regular updates available to guard against newly created viruses. In addition, experts are becoming more proficient at tracking down virus authors, who are subject to criminal charges.
• Deliberate damage to equipment or information. For example, an unhappy employee in the purchasing department could get into the company’s computer system and delete information on past orders and future inventory needs. The sabotage could severely disrupt production and the accounts payable system. Willful acts to destroy or change the data in computers are hard to prevent. To lessen the damage, companies should back up critical information.
• Spam. Although you might think that spam, or unwanted email, is just a nuisance, it also poses a security threat to companies. Viruses spread through email attachments that can accompany spam emails. The purpose of some spam is phishing, an attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and, indirectly, money) for malicious reasons like identity theft. Often the sender of the electronic communication also uses spoofing, a deliberate disguising of the sender’s identity that fools the recipient into thinking that the communication is from a trustworthy source. Spam presents other threats to a corporation: lost productivity and expenses from dealing with spam, such as opening the messages and searching for legitimate messages that special spam filters keep out.
• Software and media piracy. The copying of copyrighted software programs, games, and movies by people who haven’t paid for them is another form of unauthorized use. Piracy, defined as using software without a license, takes revenue away from the company that developed the program—usually at great cost. It includes making counterfeit CDs to sell as well as personal copying of software to share with friends.