A Crime Wave Festers In Cyberspace
from the and-so? dept
In an article that seems written more to freak nervous people out rather than inform, we learn that cybercrime is increasing at record rates. Some say it's increasing at an exponential rate, but there are some mathematical limits to just how long that's going to continue. The article blames the bad economy for making people decide to steal, but the real culprit comes out later in the article. A very large percentage of computer crime is being done by insiders. People who have legitimate access to machines who are figuring out ways to exploit that access to their own benefit. It sounds like, once again, there should be technological measures that would help make this more difficult. You're never going to prevent this sort of thing completely, but better tracking software that tracks how people use internal systems could make it more difficult. Meanwhile, the article seems to mix and match stories of people stealing money from a company and people who steal product plans. I'd say these are two very different crimes, that don't belong in the same bucket. Of course, the companies who have had product plans and such stolen estimate ridiculously high numbers when asked just how much it "cost" them, skewing all the cybercrime numbers significantly upwards.
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