Form of Technological Abuse - Essay Example

Consumers can also suffer the burden of increased loan interest rates, being denied utility services, civil suits, or criminal investigations (Baum, 2004). While the consumer costs incurred from credit card fraud may be negligible, out-of-pocket expenses can reach thousands of dollars. It is the result of all these effects of spam that there had to be infrastructure changes made. The anti-spyware legislation is currently under consideration in 27 U.S States as well as in the U.S. Congress is one of these changes. It aims to prohibit spyware from delivering advertisements to a computer under certain circumstances.. requiring spyware to provide removal procedures… and requiring the Division of Consumer Protection to collect complaints. Next is the adaptation of anti-spyware technology which makes many individual choices about what to do with suspected spyware programs. It can choose to remove spyware, ignore them or notify the user. Also To reduce identity theft and consumer loss caused by data breaches, many U.S. states have enacted laws requiring firms to notify individuals when their personal information has been stolen or lost. These mandatory disclosure policies aim to reduce overall social costs by inducing firms and consumers to take optimal care.

Many reasons motivate ISPs to improve detection in terms of architecture as well as disclosure. The first is the basic fact that the internet economy is highly dependent on information and network security and that direct damage caused by internet security incidents is approximately tens of billions of US dollars per year for the U.S. alone. In addition, all stakeholders in the information and communication system incur indirect costs associated with the prevention of these threats, which makes malware and botnets an urgent security threat. These botnets are used as a platform for attacks as well as fraudulent and criminal business models, such as the sending of spam and malicious code, the hosting of phishing sites, committing of click fraud and the theft of confidential information. The magnitude and impact of the malware threat are also influenced by the decisions and behavior of legitimate market players such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs). As security comes at a cost, tolerating some level of insecurity is economically rational therefore market players make their decision based on the perceived costs and benefits of a course of action.

Many loopholes in the system exist which might empower attackers; one of these is that home users and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) users often do not select desirable levels of protection making them easier targets for attackers. The ISPs can mitigate this threat however the indirect and direct costs associated make the transference of this responsibility to the ISPs makes the notion unfeasible. This further proves to be a motivating gap for the attackers to pursue. Also, there are indications that ISPs only deal with a fraction of the infected machines in their networks. Typical estimates by security researchers put the number of infected machines at around five percent of all connected machines at any point in time. This number suggests that the ISPs are outnumbered by the number of connected machines they are expected to look over, leaving ample room for the attackers to strike. Read More