Degree

Master of Business Administration Executive

Faculty / School

Faculty of Business Administration (FBA)

Year of Award

2013

Project Type

MBA Executive Research Project

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

Computer crime

Executive Summary

According to Symantec’s recent research report cybercrime and reprinted by Interpol in their report -"Cyber innovation and Outreach Partnering against cybercrime": Cybercrime is bigger menace than drug trafficking costing USD 288 billion per annum (Symantec INC, 2013). This number alone, is astonishing enough to investigate and determine the level of protection required to avoid being a victim of this dark economy. One of the major drawbacks of this crime is it cannot be limited by any border or territory. Cybercrime is a universal crime and its omnipresence is a serious cause of concern for everyone who has anything related to this new but unavoidable wired economy.

Computers and internetworking technologies have redefined the way we live, shop, bank and socialize. Our banking is not as it used to be a decade ago. With technologies like ATMs, CDMs, internet banking, mobile banking and online banking; our methods of banking has become easier for customers and at the same time banks are capitalizing on this channel to gain profits. Banks are now able to use their valuable resources for profit generation activities rather using them for book keeping and other mundane tasks.

However, this blessing brings a very different type of threat which is more serious than normal fraud and theft activities that were generally seen in the past. Cybercrime, uses the same technological innovation to steal valuable information and money from banking channels. Globally this threat is increasing and gaining markets everywhere. Today there is an organized market for stolen information such as credit cards, internet bank login accounts and malware. An active credit card along with PIN etc may cost as low as $15 to $250. At the same time bank account login credentials and western union accounts are also sold in this market at 2% to 20% of available balance.

FBI has recently reported a decrease in physical thefts in US whereas they have indicated a significant increase in cyber crime numbers. This trend would no longer be limited to US only and ' this will engulf the entire world sooner then it seems. This report tries to investigate the impact of cybercrime on Pakistani financial industry and gathers information from working professionals to understand the level of cybercrimes prevalent in the market. Cybercrime is generally hot reported ill the media -1) because most of cybercrime cases are not identified until a long time had already passed 2) in many cases the impact is not physical therefore it is easier to hide the crime as compared to robberies and internal frauds and 3) these crimes are technical therefore most people fail to understand nature and way the crime was executed and 4) Regulators don’t fo organization to report such incidents. This is probably the reason why many organizations easily get away from reporting this fraud.

In a 2012 World Economic Forum risk report, cyber-attacks ranked as 4^’’most likely risk faced, and in the 2013 edition cyber-attacks, data fraud/theft and digital misinformation were noted as possible contributors to ‘digital wildfires in a hyper connected world’. (World Economic Forum 2013, 2013).

Pages

33

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