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According to a 2009 study conducted by the McAfee antivirus company and entitled "Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information," data theft and breaches from cybercrime likely cost businesses whose networks were hacked as much as $1 trillion globally. This huge cost included both losses in intellectual property rights as well as expenditures for losses in productivity and network damage repair. These cost projections were based on the survey responses of more than 800 chief information officers in the United States, Germany, the U.K., Japan, China, India, Dubai, and Brazil. Respondents said that the breaches amounted to about $4.6 billion in losses, and the repairs were estimated to be as high as $600 million (Mills 2009).

The respondents conjectured that the recent global economic recession had increased the security risks for business and government networks, given that over 40 percent of displaced or laid-off employees were the main threat to sensitive and proprietary information found on networks. When asked which countries posed the biggest threats as state cybercriminals, there were marked differences. Over 25 percent of the overall survey respondents said that they avoided storing data on networks in China because of their likelihood of being attacked, while about 47 percent of the Chinese respondents suggested that the United States poses the biggest threat to the security of their online data (Mills 2009).

The growth and spread of the Internet globally within the past 20 years has fostered the growth of a variety of online crimes as well as national cybersecurity strategies and laws aimed at curbing these unwanted behaviors. In fact, an interesting debate has developed concerning the definition of online crimes, one using the terms "cybercrime" (or "cyber crime") and "computer crimes." Typically, cybercrimes occur because an individual who uses his or her special knowledge of cyberspace for personal or financial gain, and computer crimes typically involve a special knowledge of computer technology. Moreover, the interrelated nature of these behaviors further complicates the definition process; thus, many experts and the media seem to utilize these two terms interchangeably (Furnell 2002). The term "cybercrime" is used here to refer to any crime completed on or with a computer.

Broadly speaking, cybercrime includes such activities as electronic commerce, intellectual property rights (IPR) or copyright infringement, privacy rights infringement, and identity theft--a type of fraud. The domain of cybercrime also includes online child exploitation, credit card fraud, cyberstalking and cyberbullying, defaming or threatening other online users, gaining unauthorized access to computer networks (commonly known as "hacking"), and overriding encryption to make illegal copies of software or movies. Accepting that variations on the parameters constituting such unlawful acts, as well as the penalties associated with these criminal acts, vary from one jurisdiction to another globally, this continually evolving list of common cybercrimes is relevant and globally applicable (Schell and Martin 2006).

Some experts further suggest that cybercrimes are not all that different from traditional crimes. Whereas cybercrimes occur in an online environment, traditional crimes occur terrestrially. One of the best known cybercrime typologies classifies behavior along lines similar to those found in traditional crime typologies.

Cybercrimes tend to include two common criminal acts: trespassing (defined as entering unlawfully into an area to commit an offence) and theft (defined as taking or exercising illegal control over the property of another to deprive the owner of that asset (Furnell 2002).

Individuals who break into networks to cause damage or to receive personal or financial gain are commonly referred to in the media as "hackers," but many in the computer underground insist that the more appropriate term for the mal-inclined techies wreaking havoc on networks is "cracker" or "Black Hat." Talented tech savvies paid by industry and governments to find vulnerabilities in software or networks are known in the computer underground as "White Hats" (Schell, Dodge, and Moutsatsos 2002).

As technologies evolve, so do the cybercriminal activities and labels. For example, the threat posed by a new form of cybercrime called "carding"--the illegal acquisition, sale, and exchange of sensitive online information--has increased in recent years (Holt and Lampke 2010). Those who engage in such activities are known simply as "carders."

Today, the major types of cybertrespassing and cybertheft include but are not limited by these categories (Schell and Martin 2004):

- Flooding: a form of cyberspace vandalism resulting in denial of service (DoS) to authorized users of a Web site or computer system

- Infringing intellectual property rights (IPR) and copyright: a form of cyberspace theft involving the copying of a target's copyright-protected software, movie, or other creative work without getting the owner's consent to do so

- Phreaking: a form of cyberspace theft or fraud conducted by using technology to make free telephone calls

- Spoofing: the cyberspace appropriation of an authentic user's identity by nonauthentic users, causing fraud or attempted fraud and commonly called "identify theft"

- Virus and worm production and release: a form of cyberspace vandalism causing corruption and maybe even the erasing of data

Bibliography:

Furnell, S., Cybercrime: Vandalizing the Information Society. Boston, MA: Addison Wesley, 2002.

Holt, T. J., and E. Lampke,"Exploring Stolen Data Markets On-Line: Products and Market Forces." Criminal Justice Studies 33, no. 2 (2010).

Mills, Elinor, "Study: Cybercrime Cost Firms $1 Trillion Globally." January 28, 2009. news. cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10152246-83.html

Schell, B. H., J. L. Dodge, and S. S. Moutsatsos, The Hacking of America: Who's Doing It, Why, and How. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002.

Schell, B. H., and C. Martin, Webster's New World Hacker Dictionary. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2006.

Schell, B. H., and C. Martin, Cybercrime. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.

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