The-Accountant-Jan-Feb-2018

Information INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Technology
Essential Tips On
Cybercrime
How Growing Enterprises
Can Effectively Tackle It
By Victor S. Mutindah
Businesses depend on different
forms of technology to
survive the trends of the new
millennia. This has brought
to the surface a new form of
criminal act; cybercrime, that works to
ruin the new found avenue for business.
Cybercrime is a growing pervasive
occurrence that is worrying not only
the government but also businesses and
the public sector (Zappa, 2014). It has
developed to a low risk, high yield form
of crime thus attracting more individuals
into the activity; creating bands of cyber
criminals.
With the emergence of the World Wide
Web enabling people to traverse borders,
the crime has become international with
banks seemingly being the most affected.
SMEs are also fast becoming marked
targets because they offer weak security
easy to bypass and sub-standard protection
that is hacked into (Zappa, 2014).
The rate of this type of crime has
increased with breaches having an annual
increase of 50% per annum (EY, 2013).
This type of misconduct has advanced
from individual attacks and instead
moved on to SMEs and large enterprises
(Morgan, 2013). Crimes that are done over
the internet bring about economic losses
and expensive cleanup procedures once a
network is hacked. Sadly some companies
do not pick up after an attack, fading
into the mountain of statistics affected by
internet illegalities.
46 JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2018