ISSC 451 APUS Understanding Digital Crime Discussion

Respond to the following:

In this day and age cyber crimes have become extremely dangerous and can cause an enormous amount of stress both mentally and financially. One would thing that a cyber crime is not one you can see or can affect you physically, but the amount of stress caused from dealing with these types of crimes can cause an extreme downward spiral in one’s overall wellbeing.

There are many common forms of digital crime, but the main 3 that I would like to touch on are phishing, distributing child pornography, and inciting violence.

Phishing is the method of using deceptive forms of websites, emails, texts and links in order to steal any information personal and private in manner. This can be against corporations, small businesses, the government or any other private individual. A person who becomes a victim to the crime of phishing when they click on or go to a website and enter their information such as phone number, address, credit card number or information pertaining to their business. Phishing schemes can be very tricky as they typically like to duplicate legitimate websites and do a really good job at it which tricks many consumers.

Distributing child pornography is so very disturbing to me. It’s a cybercrime that not only hurts the child whose images are being distributed but it also aids into the fascination and fantasies of these child predators. Child pornography is child exploitation that uses graphically produced images distributed that is basically memorializing the sexual abuse of that specific child. Distribution of child pornography is the digital form of sexual predatory acts against minors. The sad part is those sexually deviant acts happen in person and the images are a derivative of such heinous activity. Then to distribute those images to other people is such a horrible crime. I definitely would like to do as much as possible to fight against crimes against children.

Just because we have the freedom of speech does not mean we are still allowed to say anything. There are limits to it. Criminal incitement of violence is the act of using words, conduct or images that urge or create an environment that lead people to insurrection, riots, or acts of violence. These acts have become so very popular and have led to incidents that cost people their lives.

One of the major gaps to understanding digital crime is the training and teaching of all it’s elements to citizens employees across the world. If people don’t know what it is they don’t know how to combat it! With so many opportunities to become victims, there needs to be a way for people to get a grasp on all the different crimes out there. For a business or personal computer a big gap in understanding comes when people are not protecting their systems from cyber attacks. There needs to be an easier method that can go to all people and businesses that can protect their computer and information across the board. If you’re not prepared and your system is hacked, the large amount of possibilities of bad things happening is very high. Also, urging people to be more creative with passwords and change them more often will help them from getting their information hacked.