Impacts of Cybercrime on Shareholder Value and Marketing - Essay Example

Impacts of Cybercrime on Shareholder Value and Marketing Activity of a Business Business Cybercrime Billions of dollars are lost annually by publicly traded organizations through cybercrime. Marketing activities of various companies have been disrupted by cybercrime. Moreover, when cyber criminals attack a particular company business transactions conducted by the customers are affected, since most of them become worried about the safety of their transactions with that company. Thus, cybercrime can change the perception people have about a company leading to them seeing the company as being vulnerable to e-crime. Does that vulnerability not only cause future business losses, but also cause a reduction in the market value of the company. This might be due to creditors, investors, and financial analysts concerns. This study discusses a case of Amazom.com, Yahoo.com, and Ebay.com as among the sites that have experienced cybercrime, the parties that were involved, the crime that the perpetrators committed, how they committed the crime, the impacts on the victim, and finally the consequences that the perpetrators would have faced or faced. Parties that were involved in the cybercrime Yahoo.com, Ebay.com, and Amazon.com were attacked by cyber-terrorists in February, in the year 2000. It is believed that the attack was conducted by a hacker and Elias Levy the chief technology officer at that time, of CSIS, mentioned that it was difficult to find who did the attack since there were many machines that were used to do the attack, and the attack could have been directed from any part of the globe. In addition, according to him, the same group could have held all the attacks in these three online sites since it happened almost the same day. It was later discovered that a boy by the name of Michael Calce was the one who executed the crime. Michael Calce was a fifteen year old Canadian citizen whose nickname was Mafia boy. Later this year in September, Amazon announced to its users that their passwords had to be changed, what they termed as a preventive measure towards protecting the users passwords. This was after they detected various passwords and email addresses that did not relate to Amazon, posted online. So, they had to change their user’s passwords because they believed that the same passwords were used in other websites. Users were advised not to use their previous passwords for the sake of safety (Snoopy, 2014). The Crime Michael Calce developed Project Rivolta that was responsible for taking down the search engines of these sites (Bear, 2000). The software helped him to hack into the websites of Amazon, eBay, Dell, CNN, and yahoo and made some harmful alterations to the program coding. The sites experienced the same attacks that were characterized by internet messages that flowed massively into these sites automatically, and then they were swamped by numerous messages. Consequently, the routine traffic was blocked, causing slow operations. The ability of the sites to allow customers into their stores dropped tremendously, making them inaccessible (Bear, 2000). Impact on the victims These websites were forced to shut down because the problem was so severe in such that they were unable to go on with their operations. According to Bear (2000), the shut down was aimed at stopping the cybercrime activities and repairing the damage it caused. Future break-ins were prevented by a change in the programs. Furthermore, the stock prices of these companies were affected in such that they dropped by a significant margin within those two hours. Analysts believe that Yahoo lost more than five hundred thousand dollars since most of its revenues is generated through advertisements. This is because viewers of the adverts could not view them because they had shut down the site for two hours. Perpetrator’s consequences The Canadian police arrested Calce, and since he pleaded guilty for the cybercrime, he was to face three years in jail but he was detained in a juvenile correctional center for eight months. In addition, he was forced to make a donation of two hundred and fifty dollars to charity. Although Calce faced these consequences, there have been difficulties in enforcing numerous laws that have been put in place to address the problems of cybercrime. Various researchers posit that it is difficult to enforce laws related to online behaviors due to some reasons like; identity and anonymity. Before jurisdiction is done, the police must know who the criminal is, where he or she is located, before making an arrest. Since one can hide his or her identity when using the internet, it becomes difficult to make an arrest. Cyber criminals have been using services that are designed to hide the IP address of the user for a fee (Bear, 2000). Studies that have been conducted by various cybercrime researchers shows that the perception that people have about anonymity while using online services might trigger their engagement in illegal and offensive online behaviors. Various attempts to track identity of online users have raised privacy advocates issues and political issues. Some communities allow anonymity and ending it could lead to punishments to those who expose their identities. In addition, law enforcers are allowed only to enforce law within their area of jurisdiction, and as a result, the process of arresting cybercriminals becomes involved. The U.S and other countries are working together to come up with laws that crosses national and state boundaries. Additionally, computer forensics has developed to the point of coming up with tools that examine the evidence from the digital sources without distortion. Thus, deleted data can be retrieved and data can be preserved for court presentation by highly trained examiners. Therefore, to avoid cybercrimes that have negative impact to organizations around the world, strict laws against it must be enforced across states and nations. References Bear, S. (2000, February 8). Cyber Terrorists running rampant. Bear Forum. Retrieved 30 September from http://www.bearforum.com/cgi-bin/bbs1.pl?read=1559. Snoopy, (2014, September 22). Amazon accounts hacked? Your Amazon.com password has been changed. Hacking news. Retrieved 9 October from http://hackingnews.com/cyber-crime/amazon-accounts-hacked-amazon-com-password-changed/ . Read More