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Cybercrime : A World Problem

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1.0 Introduction
Cybercrime is an ever-increasing issue in the modern business world. It is rapidly becoming a business opportunity open to everyone driven by profit (Jones, 2007). In cybercrime, the perpetrator typically gains access to a computer system without the owner’s authorisation (Davis, 2003). It is often not just one particular type of cybercrime that is occurring, but usually when individuals think of cybercrime they immediately think of viruses or worms (Table 1) (Hutchings, 2012). These types of crimes are becoming a world problem that costs the government, businesses and individuals millions of dollars annually. In the past year, Australia lost $1.06 billion affecting mainly small businesses that make up 96% of all …show more content…

This is depicted in figure 1 (Cheng and Liu, 2009). One of the major vulnerabilities in which small businesses have is that they are understaffed and do not have enterprise-level security measures for their sensitive data (Hayden, 2015). It is often admitted from small businesses that they have had cyber-attacks where private information was compromised and clients suffered losses but did not report it (Smith, Smith, and Smith, 2011). Many business owners believe that by reporting the incident they could lose potential customers. Other major vulnerabilities include expertise, time, resources to install software updates, having a wireless network which makes them vulnerable to network exploitation, unsecured SQL databases, poorly configured firewalls, and interconnected peer networks with weak security (Swan, 2013). Table 2 provides more information on how vulnerabilities affect the business individually (Patteson, 2013). Also the costs involved in implementing the security measures could be a disincentive for business who deem it as a threat that might not even happen. . Looking further into the vulnerabilities of small businesses it can be seen that the risks are real and require appropriate security measures.
Figure 1: Inadequate setup of the business systems impact

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