Cyber Crime: An Asymmetric Battlefield.

With the proliferation of the Internet, more and more people come to use it as a means for more than just email or looking up facts.  Many people use it for banking, work, school and other activities where they display a plethora of personal information.  Online social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow people to put their whole life story online for friends, and  others, to see.  Along with these social network sites, banks have also joined in on the advantages of the internet.  One doesn’t even have to get up off the couch to manage all aspects of his financial life.  Just sign into your account online and you can access your current and past financial activity.  There are many important organizations out there that rely very heavily on the use of technology to run their operations.  Transportation, emergency services, banking, the military and many federal agencies have become very reliant on computers to run their business more efficiently.

There is so much reliance on computers now that the amount of information that’s out there is scary.  In an undergraduate project I was able to gather enough information on a company along with the addresses of its president and vice president that inflicting harm via computer technology would not have been difficult.  All of this information was gathered without leaving the front of my laptop.  The advancement of technology and our trust in it is inevitable.  There will always be criminals, both foreign and domestic, that will look to gain any type of advantage that they could through the use of technology and peoples misuse of it.  Terrorists have become a prime example of a group that has access to the internet and looks to the cyberworld as another avenue to further their goals.