Cybercrime Identity Theft

Before diving further into this topic, it is necessary to define several terms relating to cybercrime and identity theft. Dictionary.com defines cybercrime as criminal activity or a crime that involves the Internet, a computer system, or computer technology. Identity theft is the fraudulent appropriation and use of someone's identifying or personal data or documents, such as a credit card. Phishing is defined as trying to obtain financial or other confidential information from Internet users, typically by sending an email that looks as if it is from a legitimate organization, usually a financial institution, but contains a link to a fake website that replicates the real one. A derivative of phishing, called vishing, is trying to obtain financial or other confidential information from people by placing phone calls, typically automated, that seem to be from a legitimate organization, usually a financial institution. Spam is disruptive online messages, especially commercial messages posted on a computer network or sent as email (Dictionary.com, 2015). With these terms defined, it …show more content…
While phishing is still the initial attack vector of most identity theft related crimes, it is not occurring at a level that the average person needs to be concerned about. Data breaches have only become a noticed event over the last ten years due to required notification and disclosure of data breaches to victims happening at the federal level from The Identity Theft Red Flags Rule of 2007, an addition to Code of Federal Regulations at 16 C.F.R. §681.2 (Finklea, 2012). Prior to this, notification was left to the state regulatory level. Given the limited window of trend analysis and full disclosure information, the numbers regarding data breaches are still