COMPUTER CRIME

Computer Crime and Ethical Issues

Computer Crime and Ethical Issues

Introduction

With the advent, of technology in personal computers and telecommunication networks, the management of information is critical to many organizational activities. Information is knowledge and power. The use of information is absolutely essential in situation assessment, problem analysis, strategic and tactical planning, and business operations. Large volumes of corporate data are stored, retrieved, merged, sorted, transmitted and processed within seconds by the Information Systems over computer networks. In view of our increasing dependency on Information Systems (IS) to process large volumes of valuable corporate information, Information Security becomes a crucial management issue. Various survey studies have indicated that computer abuse/crime is a growing global problem. Information is becoming the commodity of greatest value (Tobias 2005) and a firm's primary source of competitive power.

In this research paper, we are going to discuss the ethical issues related computer crime.

Thesis Statement: Millions of individuals and organizations are now dependant on the computers for information processing over the Internet. This makes the computers vulnerable to various criminal abuses and causes an upward trend of computer-related crime activities.

Definitions and Classifications of Computer Crime

There is no universal definition and classification of computer abuse or computer crime. Terms like computer abuse, computer crime, computer-related crime, cyber crime, technology crime, hi-tech crime and information crime are commonly used interchangeably with more or less similar meaning. Basically, these are the misdemeanors involving the use of advanced computer and information technology. Classification of computer crimes is based on the role of the computer technology used by the perpetrator with respect to the criminal act.

Definitions of Computer Abuse

In Longley and Sham's dictionary, computer abuse is defined as “willful or negligent unauthorized activities that affect the availability, confidentiality or integrity of computer resources”. “Availability is the condition in which the data or systems provide assurance of service. Confidentiality is the condition in which data or programs are protected from unauthorized disclosure. Integrity is the condition in which data or programs are protected from the unauthorized modification” (Thompson 2002). In Longley and Sham's definition of computer abuse (1987), the act of omission is not included. There are three levels of computer abuse: (a) slight abuse can be defined as acts that represent management, problems, e.g. using corporate computers to run games, (b) serious abuse is defined as acts that cause a problem to the computer resources or services, e.g. unauthorized use, denial of service, and (c) criminal acts are acts that constitute criminal liabilities, e.g. embezzlement and fraud. Straub's (2005) definition of computer abuse is “the unauthorized and deliberate misuse of the asset of an organization's Information System which affects the hardware, the software, the data and/or the service”. In Straub's (1990) definition of computer abuse, the existence of incus rca is required during the abusive acts “the unauthorized and deliberate misuse of assets of thelocal organizational information systems by individuals, including violation against hardware, programs, data and computer services”. This definition of computer abuse is rather ...