“Cyber-crime is criminal activity or a crime that involves the Internet, a computer system,
or computer technology” (DIC). Cyber-crimes are a growing issue that businesses have to take
seriously and have to understand the ethical responsibility that they have to protect their
customers confidential information and have to understand the amount of trust that a customer
puts on the business to be able to protect their confidential information. There are so many types
of cyber-crimes that can be committed to a business such as cyber-spoofing, cyber-assault, cyber–
extortion, cyber-germ warfare and cyber-vandalism, which can be used to perform an identity
theft. If businesses do not take the ethical responsibility of protecting its customers confidential
information then they could lose the trust of their customers and end up hurting their business
financially.
“Cyber-spoofing is when someone falsely adopts the identity of another computer user or
by creating a false identity on a computer Web site to commit fraud” (Book). Spoof is a word
that means to attempt to deceive someone, to play tricks on someone as well as creating a hoax
against someone. Thus cyber-spoofing means when someone attempts to fool someone or a
certain computer and there are different kinds of cyber-spoofing. E-mail spoofing has become a
major problem while using the Web. Someone cyber-spoofing is able to send you emails
pretending to be someone else such as a business and is able to send you email with an intent of
trying to hurt the party that is being cyber-spoofed in some way such as in an attempt to obtain
information such as your credit card number (tech).
For a business cyber-spoofing has to be taken seriously this type of cyber-terrorism can
harm both the business and its consumers and the business has to be able to protect them and
their consumers. If a cyber-criminal were to be able to create an email that is sent out from the
email address of the business, people that are customers of that business would be more willing
to trust the email and are more likely to respond.
The cyber-criminal could be able to create the email to be able to obtain information
from the customers, such as if it were to say you have to update your login information and first
make you enter your actual login information before you could change your password. Since the
data the customer provides the cyber-criminal with will allow the cyber-criminal to be able to
access that customer’s personal information and possibly be able to obtain financial data such as
credit card information. In addition the cyber-criminal could just ask in the email to update your
credit card information, in which the cyber-criminal would be able to do whatever he wanted
with it. This type of spoofing is called “phishing which means the cyber-criminal sends out
phony emails that solicit buyers and, in the process, obtain credit card information, account
