Cybercrimes increase with rise in digital footprint

Business and banking operations constitute a wide field for cybercrime because today’s business is characterised by its heavy reliance on cyber technologies and swift banking. But how do cybercriminals benefit therefrom?

People often get confused between electronic business and electronic-commerce. The latter is but one element of e-business. Ebusiness is defined broadly as any business that relies on an automated information system.

Cybercrime committed in the context of e-business takes different forms such as information piracy, forgery, credit card manipulation, and fraud in cyber exchange machines, money transfers across international borders, online gambling, illegal trading of stock and bonds of multinational companies and financial institutions, and trade in fake or prohibited goods. Ebusiness-related cybercrimes overlap with money laundering operations. Such crimes are committed by leaking dirty business into the heart of legitimate e-business and then re-smuggling them to areas that are difficult to control.

The fight against the phenomenon of cybercrime faces several difficulties. The more significant and more serious of them is the absence of accurate statistics on the number of crimes committed, their different patterns and the size of financial losses resulting from such crimes, especially as they are not detected immediately after their commission. Yet, the statistics of the small portion that is detected are not brought to the attention of the official authorities. Thus, the economic features of many countries, financial institutions and companies remain unclear, putting them under suspicion and instability. The absence of accurate statistics on the size of cybercrimes is imputable to several factors, the most important of which are:

• The confidentiality protection of banking transactions is the focus of cybercrimes.

• The rapid movement of virtual funds and electronic payment wallets.

• Lack of effective mechanisms for auditing the movement of electronic money.

• Multiple forms of fraud and fraud software.

• Lack of secure codes to use over the internet. High-tech information and communication technologies have imposed themselves on many transactions that people perform or that which affect people’s daily life. Satellite communication equipment, precision medical equipment, CT scan, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), e-mail, electronic commerce and means of control over industries and weapons of mass destruction have been held hostage to high-tech information and communication technologies.

This rapid expanded use of hightech information and communication technologies at the national levels and through global information infrastructures has helped increase the chances of high-tech crime and cybercrime.

Keeping abreast of these technical changes that have begun to dominate human life and transactions, and the prospects for this trend to grow in the future, oblige the parties involved in the fight against crime, and the managers and supervisors of different governmental and civil activities to do the following:

1. Recognise the Global Information Environment, which produces cybercrime, and explain to staff under their direction.

2. Elaborate legislation to combat cybercrime.

3. Design awareness-raising programmes to prevent cybercrime.

4. Review the rules of evidence and develop special ones for digital evidence to keep up with cybercrime.

5. Identify the different types of crimes related to computer, internet networks and global web pages according to the concepts adopted in developed countries that control the techniques of such crimes.

6.Develop cyber-criminal justice systems to deal with cybercrime and cybercriminals.

7. Strengthen regional and international cooperation and develop mechanisms to tackle transnational cybercrime.

8.Select, guide and train specialised human resources to detect and investigate cybercrime, and handle digital evidence at all stages of criminal justice processes.