Internal copies of your software company's breakthrough application, due for release next quarter, have been posted to the Net by a disgruntled ex-employee. Potential loss: $9 million in R&D--and your job.
What began as an innocent chat-room flirtation isn't so innocent anymore. The last e-mail message you received began: "I know where you live. I know where you work. I know where your kids go to day care...." Potential loss: Your life.
There is no way to calculate how many hundreds or thousands of times each day the Net brings crime into some unsuspecting person's life. But a report released by the Computer Security Institute found that nearly two-thirds of the 520 corporations, government offices, financial institutions and universities queried had experienced electronic break-ins or other security breaches in the past 12 months.
With nearly a quarter-billion dollars vanishing into the ether, you'd think someone would call the cops.
But those charged with enforcing the law in cyberspace say the vast majority of Net-borne crime never reaches the criminal justice system. And in the relatively few instances where a crime is reported, most often the criminal's true identity is never found.
The San Jose Police Department's elite high-tech crimes unit is every citizen's first line of defense when trouble comes down the wire in the capital city of Silicon Valley. But today, four years after the explosion of the Internet as a mass market, even the top technology-crimes police unit in the country finds itself with just a handful of Internet crimes to investigate.