Computer Crime

Question 1: Discuss the losses suffered by the companies and compare the dollar values for losses between the various offenses. Offer your opinions on why certain offenses are responsible for greater losses than others. Tell the reader if any of the comparisons made were surprising to you.

 

Computer virus crimes were the most expensive offense costing companies $9.8 million in recovery costs and $12.0 million in other monetary losses for a combined total of $21.8 million dollars in 2001. The average cost per incident would be $171,653. Fraud was the next most expensive offense in 2001 causing $18.1 million in damage in only 17 incidents. The average cost per incident would be $1.06 million dollars. The lease expensive offense in 2001 was theft of proprietary information which resulted in only a half a million dollars in damages.

Certain offenses such as creating or deploying a computer virus are responsible for much greater financial loss than something like the theft of proprietary information because the recovery costs are compounded on top of the initial loss. Offenses like embezzlement and fraud are committed for the sole purpose of illegally obtaining money from a company and therefore nearly all loss is the value of that taken rather than that loss plus recovery costs.  I was surprised to see the costs of a denial of service attack. I did not realize it was such a costly crime.

           

 

Question 2: Discuss the percentages of employee versus non-employee involvement for the various offenses. Offer opinions on why certain offenses are more likely to involve employee involvement. Tell the reader if any of the percentages for the various offenses were surprising to you.

 

Overall, theft type offenses are shown to be primarily committed by employees whereas computer attack types of offenses are for the most part committed by non-employee offenders.

            Embezzlement ranks highest with 87.5% of reported incidents being attributed to employees. It makes sense that this offense would have the highest rate of offenders as employees simply because embezzlement by nature requires a close connection between the offender and victim/company.

            It was surprising to see that in this study no employees were offenders in vandalism or sabotage incidents. I would have expected a (very small) few disgruntled employees particularly in large tech-driven companies. As a side note, it was interesting to see that larger companies had far higher detection rates on computer crime than did smaller companies.