Cybercrime

DEFINITION

Cybercrime is a broad term that describes criminal activities using a computer and a network. The computer can be the target of the criminal activity, e.g. when introducing "viruses" and other malicious codes; or the tool to carry out the criminal activity, e.g. spamming, certain copyright infringements (music file sharing), identify theft, or "phishing"; or the lieu of "traditional" crime like cyberstalking or child pornography.

IMPACT ON e-BUSINESS

The moment you go "on-line" your computer is prone to suffer from an attack within 7 seconds, according to statistics. Thus, you need to protect it by technical means such as software programmes. However, despite of precautions, you may become the victim of cybercrime (or cyberhooliganism) that may hamper your business considerably. Examples are:

Identity theft
Somebody takes your on-line identity (e.g. e-mail address) and sends out spam. YOU will figure on spamming black lists, often without knowing it. Solutions to it are yet to be found!

Spamming
Most technical protections (firewalls) prevent extensive spamming attacks that may paralyze your e-mail traffic. Thus, it si necessary to up-date those technical protections regularly to be abreast with cyber-hooligans!

Denial-of-service attack
One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable (Wikipedia).

Cybersquatting and brandjacking
Cybersquatting is commonly defined as "using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else" (Wikipedia). However, in on-line tourism, cybersquatting and/or brandjacking is far more nocive as it ruins the business and reputation of very legitimate tourist service providers. As an example, cybersquatters pretend to be a (small) hotel, they take the image, text from the original and accept bookings - which eventually never go to the real hotel. Thus, the persons who book arrive at the hotel where no reservation is known, and prices differ. Solutions to this behaviour are yet to be found!