Cybercrimes (Essay Sample)

Cybercrimes
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In the past few years, technology and computer use have grown massively. People use them both at homes and in offices for personal and commercial reasons. The increase of use of computers brings changes in most sectors in a nation. The banking sector, communication, health, and education are the major users of the computers. They rely on information technology (IT) to carry out most of their activities, as IT is efficient and accurate (Engdahl, 2010). Despite the growth bringing improvements in the activities in the various sectors, it has brought some negative effects. One of them is cyber-crime. It takes place when people use the computers to carry out some criminal activities. Cyber-crime takes place through the internet. The government, police department and citizens of a nation need to work together to ensure rates of cybercrime are reduced or completely eradicated.
One of the ways cybercrime takes place through hacking. An unauthorized user accesses a person's computer without permit. The unauthorized user uses different software to access through a person's computer regardless of the location of the computer they want to access. They steal the person's sensitive and personal information and use it for their benefit. Another way is through copyrights theft. People download movies, music, eBooks and software from different sites on the internet while others sell them after download (Ross, 2010). Most of this information is supposed to be bought, however; people get a free way to have them without any fee. It is unfortunate as their developers end up not getting enough profit as they had anticipated.
The crime is practiced in banks too. The criminal acquires data concerning a person's debit and credit card, personal bank account and any other important information linked to a person's finances (Sites.google.com, 2015). With access to that data, they can manipulate their way to get money from the account leading to the individual's financial losses that can cause a person's credit history be spoilt. Some groups both individual and protest have hacked websites of large organizations. Some have even tampered with national defense information as a threat to the country. It is a form of cybercrime. Cyber criminals at times aim at web servers. They make many requests to that server, causing the server to use maximum bandwidth. The server might end up breaking down and slowing any processes in the websites (Berlatsky, 2014). It brings losses to businesses, which rely mostly on their websites to make transactions or communication to any customer, supplier or shareholders. Another way is to send web links to internet users, which have malware. Any person who ends up installing the malware into the system experiences difficulties with the computer as it does not function properly.
Computer users need to have antivirus software installed on their computers to detect any malware that could affect the computer. Firewalls and intrusion detection systems are useful to prevent cyber-crimes. Use of constantly updated passwords and usernames restricts any unauthorized person from accessing the computer. It is also impor...