Thursday, November 1, 2012

Victim of a Cyber Crime?


In the United States, like most countries, cybercrime, at the office, home or with people you trust, may lead to economic loses or personal abuse.  In the United States, most cyber crime offenses are covered by – Title 18, United States Code (USC) Section 1030 – fraud and related activity in connection with computers.  This is what the cyber criminal contravened when they logged into your account.

The Department of Justice website contains a Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section with a contact page for reporting incidents to local, state or Federal Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA).

Two Federal Law Enforcement Agencies have a remit to investigate some computer crimes:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

The United States Secret Service (USSS)

As a victim you should report the crime at your FBI Local Office, or US Secret Service or Internet Crime Complaint Centre.

Remediation
Victims should change their webmail password immediately and use a robust password that can be memorized rather than one which you have to write down. Victims could also consider using password management software (examples include 1Password, LastPass or KeePass) where you only will need to remember one complicated master password.

Conclusion                                                                                      In general, it's important that all computer crime is reported. Even if no investigation follows, crime report intelligence can be built up and an accurate picture of the levels of computer crime can be produced.
If victims of a particular crime do not come forward to report incidents, then the number stated in crime reporting statistics will be not be a true reflection of the number of crimes taking place.
We have not included any corporation’s AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) that may be in place and may have been breached. Consult your employer, if the cybercrime was committed on your job.

This article is not intended to be legal advice, hire an attorney if you are a victim of a cyber crime. Article compliments of the Law Figeroux & Associates.

2 comments:

  1. I guess most people refuse to report cyber crimes because they don't view it as a big deal or they probably are unaware that anything can be done about it. However, cyber bullying is getting a lot of attention lately and people have been speaking out against that.


    Safiya S.

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  2. It's been said that more than 40 member nations of the Council of Europe drafted an international treaty aimed at the protection of society against cyber crime. Computer users should keep their antivirus and firewall programs up to date, and think before they click.

    ReplyDelete