Cybercrime
The advent of the internet as a critical business tool has rendered the cyberspace to be volatile to criminal activities. In the last decade, the level of crime rate attributed to cyberspace has gone up tenfold. The city of North Las Vegas has not been spared in the increase in several attacks.
The city, being home to a youthful population and also for hosting many tech companies, has seen a fair share of cybercrime. Information that can be accessed shows that there are millions of would-be attacks every month in the city. The last case was reported in January 2020, where the criminals hacked the city’s administrative functions and email system. The reason why this case happened was that the city uses cyberspace to receive payments and levies and stores basic information of all its population in its networks. This means that anyone with malicious intent would be interested in the data. The fact that this is an election year makes it more susceptible to cyber-attacks as more people try to influence the masses or get their information for manipulative purposes. The cybercriminals hijack information and demand for ransom from the targeted victims for them to release it back to them.
The attack on the administration was noted and reported to the IT specialists. They were very speedy and thwarted the attacks by installing firewalls and other protective measures to the network. The cybercriminals, in this case, did not manage to get through, and therefore the cost implication is not yet clear. However, the audit is ongoing, and the details have not been released to the public.
The second case of cybercrime was documented at the main state of Nevada, where a breach in the system led to the loss of personal information on the marijuana program. The data from Nevada had been collected from all the cities in the state, and the city of North Las Vegas had already submitted its details. The main information included social security information of the marijuana users, the dispensaries that the users had been committed to, and also the rehabilitation programs.
The cost implications of these two cases run into millions of dollars. However, the details are not clear as there is no policy in place to authorize information access to the public. The other cost that is attributed to these attacks is that of business interruptions. The cost factor can be analyzed based on the number of labor hours that are used to detect and control the damage caused by the attacks. The formulation of the cyber-crime policy will make it easier to prosecute and have a cost factor that can be attributed to system crime.