Cybercrime Issues Discussion - Essay Example

The first of these that will be discussed is piracy. Although piracy has traditionally been viewed as a problem that is specific to a young generation of music downloaders 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 distributes or creates a software product, its 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 how a firm can seek to ameliorate how 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 does not rely on the development of software as a means to earn its revenues, the firm will need to be responsible for how 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 the 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 firms that deal with an entire litany of different industries and/or businesses. 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 analysis 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 about how to interpret threats that present themselves daily. Furthermore, concerning fraud, this is almost always the type of situation in which employee lack of knowledge presents the ultimate threat. With regards to fraud, the individual can understand this as a type of instance in which phishing schemes and others present the greatest threat. in this respect, seeking to engage employees with the types of information that are the most threat as well as ensuring that a level of supervisory oversight reduces risk is the most effective means of minimizing risk (Babu, 2013). However, one should not assume that fraud is a threat from the outside only. Because unscrupulous and dishonest employees represent a threat, the firm should seek to ensure that a robust policy of oversight and compliance that mitigates such a risk is also a primary means by which such a risk can be mitigated.