Discussion Week 10 Assignment: Vulnerability to Cybercrime

Vulnerability to Cybercrime
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Vulnerability to Cybercrime
Cybercrime is a fast-growing crime that has spread worldwide. Cybercrime involves the use online-based communications through the computer internet to target the users connected to such networks. The perpetrators of cybercrime are taking advantage of the speed, anonymity, and convenience of the internet to cause serious crimes that range from mere nuisance to those that are very serious and costly. As an individual, one is vulnerable to at least one form of these cybercrimes, either being serious and costly such as the identity theft via credit card fraud or petty crimes merely intended to cause life miseries but are less serious and not costly. An example is cyber stalking.
Identifying theft through credit card fraud is a form of cybercrime in which a perpetrator obtains credit card information and uses them to attack the card user. Cyber criminals use the card details to make purchases and more seriously open accounts with the owner's credentials in which they later on request loans that bear the name of the card owner (Kahn & Liñares-Zegarra, 2016). According to Federal Trade Commission, more than nine million cases of credit card fraud are reported annually in the United States of America. Major identity theft through credit cards occurs when the users are shopping or doing financial banking online using the public internet (McGuire & Dowling, 2013). Card users may forget to log out their accounts after using a public computer, and the cyber criminals simply get into the computer and operate the account (McGuire & Dowling, 2013). Also, when shopping online, there are phishing messages that pop up on the screen and mimic the identity of the financial bank provider (Kahn & Liñares-Zegarra, 2016). The message contains a link that intimidates the user to follow claiming that there is an error with bank balance or an urgent error with ...