Cybercrime is an unfortunate topic that many people face the hard task of putting up with every day. Over the last few years there are many memorable and relevant cases where cybercrime has taken center stage. With this comes social and economic impacts that affect many companies and people worldwide. There are many different attempts and ways to deal with cybercrime that are effective and non-effective. Cybercrime plays a huge role in the world we live in today and needs to be addressed.

Cybercrime can be divided into two parts. Phishing is one of the most popular types of cybercrime, where the victim unknowingly gives away information such as passwords, credit card numbers, and identity information to others while thinking they are on a legitimate site. The other type of cybercrime is much more serious, including things such as pornography, extortion, and terrorist activities. Hacking into programs and companies is also a cybercrime that is taken very seriously, although with a good hacker, it can be very hard to identify the perpetrator. As an interesting fact, an identity is stolen every 3 seconds in the world due to cybercrime.

Besides identities being stolen, there have been many popular cases of cybercrime. For example, in 2013, 6 people were arrested after causing ticket seller StubHub over 1 million dollars in damages by confiscating over 1,600 credit card numbers. To put this into perspective, the social and economic effects were bad for StubHub, as they were out of a lot of money, and they lost a lot of users because they no longer felt secure using the site. This is not the only popular case of cybercrime though. For gamers, possible the most well-known case of cybercrime came in 2011, when the PlayStation Network by Sony was shut down for 23 days due to a massive attack. Tens of millions of credit card information was stolen, all passwords were stolen, coming to a total of 77 million people having information stolen in some way. This took a massive hit on the social status of Sony, as it is still a topic of discussion with new users today. After this scandal, many users made the switch to rival company Microsoft, and bought the X-Box gaming system. As was predicted, Sony took a major hit financially, as they had no game sales, video sales, or music sales coming in for over 3 weeks. On top of that, Sony awarded users a totaled 15 million dollars’ worth of free games after the system was recovered as an apology.

What kind of efforts are being made today in order to deal with things like this? Well, many companies have hired a special team that have the sole responsibility of anticipating and protecting from attacks. The FBI even has a department that specializes in protecting against computer attacks. However, what about the average user. Any ordinary person that uses a computer. The first part is education and training. In order to understand and combat activities like this, one must be aware of what is going on in the first place. Almost 75% of computer users actually have no idea they are the victim of cyber-crime until they are informed by someone else. When it comes to larger companies, many have now made sure that computer networks are more secure, and they are equipped with the appropriate digital assets. It is often small business’ that are targeted the most because they are more unlikely to have the right assets and resources to detect problems early enough to do something about it.

Cybercrime is a huge part of computing life today, and it is not going away anytime soon. Whether it be an individual or a business, everyone is prone to an attack at any point and time. Just ask businesses like StubHub and Sony, who have each been the victims of large attacks that have cost those billions. They have also been impacted socially as well. It is very easy to see that cybercrime is a big deal in today’s society that should be paid attention too.