Cybercrimes have been dominating our politics, our finances and our national security. Not a day goes by without news of another cyberattack, hacking scheme or massive data breach. They range in scale from simple identity theft of credit card numbers or online passwords to the recent WannaCry attack by North Korean hackers that disrupted computer systems in English hospitals, Chinese universities and German railways. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, U.S. companies and government agencies suffered a record 1,093 data breaches last year, a 40-percent increase from 2015.
The CEO of IBM Corp. has ominously identified cybercrime as “the greatest threat to every profession, every industry, every company in the world,” while the CEO of Lloyd’s estimated that cyberattacks cost businesses as much as $400 billion per year. Meanwhile, the new enforcement directors at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently warned that hacking crimes are the great threats to our financial markets. Even President Donald Trump has acknowledged cybertheft as “the fastest growing crime in the United States.”
