Cybercrime: Local to Global Essay Example

The contemporary world is witnessing rapid changes in technological advancements that come with a raft of benefits to the end users. However, there is a downside to this trend brought about by cybercrime which is also growing as fast as technological breakthroughs. The cyberspace has attracted criminal elements who take advantage of the anonymity, convenience, and speed of the internet to execute various criminal activities that leave a trail of threat to victims and serious harm to those on the receiving end. According to the Interpol, cybercrime is clustered into two categories where there is cyber-enabled crime and high-tech crime. High-tech crime or advanced cybercrime is the sophisticated attack on technological software and hardware; while cyber-enabled crime entails the conventional crimes like terrorism, child molestation and abuse, as well as financial crimes conducted via the internet platform.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Cybercrime has become rampant in all countries all over the world going by the available statistics. Hackers are fond of using malware to attack various websites and other internet businesses to commit crime, especially online financial theft (Moskowitz, 2017). The United States, China, and Spain have been noted to be on the receiving end of these criminal activities with 51%, 17%, and 16% of their online platforms reported as attacked by malware introduced by hackers. This trend is a worrying to the global business arena because new ways of committing cybercrime that cost companies billions of dollars are evolving all the time. There has been a shift from small groups of people or individuals being engaged in cybercrime to the new face of the criminal entities that form global networks that commit internet crimes on an unprecedented scale. The black market and underground criminal networks have taken advantage of the dark internet to advance their criminal agenda.

Closer home to the local Canadian scene, cybersecurity has become a source of concern to most citizens due to the increasing threat posed by cybercrime. The chances of being victimized as a result of a breach in cybersecurity are increasing by the day with most citizens calling for effective measures to be implemented to avert such occurrences. The fact remains that money laundering, terrorism, and human trafficking have become lesser offences for Canadians because they cannot only get done through the traditional means, but also get executed through the cyberspace. This gives law enforcement authorities a headache especially because the majority of the Canadians believe that cybercriminals are too complicated for the policing authorities to do anything about it. There is a general sense of helplessness that Canadian experience when it comes to their protection against criminal elements on the internet.

Conclusion

The Canadian statistics on the effect of cybercrime on both businesses and individuals are not good at all. Cybersecurity concerns have prevented 54% of Canadians from carrying out their tasks with 53% of the country's internet users unable to access various internet services or resources (Krebs, 2014). 30% of the domestic citizens have had to incur additional data recovery or both hardware and software repair costs thanks to hacking and other forms of cybercrime. These statistics show the need for public officers to rise to the occasion with regard to finding solutions on the menace. The ideal approach to handling this would be the implementation of preventive measures as well as policy formulation geared towards deterring prospective and existing cybercriminals from engaging in the vice.

References

Krebs, B. (2014). Spam nation: The inside story of organized cybercrime--from global epidemic to your front door. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks Inc.

Moskowitz, S. (2017). Cybercrime and business: Strategies for global corporate security. San Diego, California: Elsevier Science.