Order Description:
The case study for this class is to forecast future trends in digital crime and digital terrorism. Learning from the past can help law enforcement forecast future trends in crime to facilitate creation of best practices for investigation and prosecution of computer crime along with researching all past, present, and future aspects of emerging methodologies in digital crime.
You are to research information related to forecasting future trends in digital crime and digital terrorism. Outline the eight primary forecasts as related to computer crime. Based on the analysis of the eight predicted forecasts, analyze the forecasts and describe the important factors of each. Provide examples of each forecast and demonstrate how law enforcement can use these to improve the possibility of mitigating future forecasts.
Forecast 1: The number of offenses reported to the police involving computers and electronic storage media will continue to increase substantially, requiring changing priorities for resource allocation, new training for line officers and investigations, new police specialties, and new knowledge for prosecuting attorneys and judges.
Forecast 2: The largest computer crime program affecting local law enforcement representing the largest number of victims and the largest monetary loss will be Internet fraud, including fraud via identify theft.
Forecast 3: Virtual crimes against persons will increase at a faster rate compared with the past years as a result of the significant expansion in networking, personal computing, and social networking sites. These hybrid crimes, which have coercive characteristics similar to those found in psychological warfare, will require new laws expressly to address the problem and new methodologies for investigation, prevention, and education.
Forecast 4: Computer hacker groups will emerge in developing countries around the world, increasing the threat of malicious attacks motivated by religion, politics, and money
Forecast 5: Current organized crimes groups, particularly those that are entrepreneurial, will increasingly adopt computerization as a criminal instrument.
Forecast 6: Terrorist groups will increasingly use global networking as a tool to accomplish their goals. This includes use of the Internet for recruitment, surreptitious communications, and coordination purposes as well as attempting to use network access to critical infrastructure systems to strike for their cause via the creation of chaos, disinformation, and the file destruction-cyberterrorism.
Forecast 7: The character of espionage will continue to broaden into the arenas of information warfare, economic espionage, and the theft of intellectual property.
Forecast 8: Criminals, terrorists, nation-states, patriots, and anarchists will increasingly use technology-based instruments and methodologies, which can surreptitiously capture data/information or destroy technological communications, information processing, and/or storage appliances.