“The remark at all times in cases like this is ‘Why didn’t the dealer tell me?‘” says Harold Joseph Highland, a top computer crime consultant and author of Protect Your Microcomputer System (John Wiley & Sons, 1984).
A store can only sell you a computer, not common sense. Nor can this chapter impart it to you. It can, however, pound away at the elements of data security—people, policies, hardware, and software. They go together, these four. And so do the criminal and noncriminal parts of data security. If you’ve lost control of your computer files and don’t know what’s normal, you’ll hardly notice the abnormal. You’ll never thwart a computerized embezzler, for instance, with a gun. You will with good software. Buy it and errors in your electronic files may leap out at you. May. Remember Canyes’s Law of Computing: “Sooner or later you’ll feel like killing yourself.”
In other places I’ve written about good software and other mundane ways to make yourself less suicidal. And here, too, you’ll read of everyday calamities like coffee spilled on floppy disks. But this is also the fun chapter, the one with the stories about errant whiz kids and a computer crook who supposedly stole $8 million and got away with it.
Each of their sins met Harold Joseph Highland’s definition of a computer-related crime. They were “committed using a computer as a tool.”
“In other words,” explains Highland, who has taught computer science at the State University of New York, “you use the computer to get to financial records. Or to get to software if you’re illegally copying software.”
Estimates of the size of the threat have ranged from the double-digit millions up to over $5 billion a year. This uncertainty has sparked a feud between the icebergers and some computer makers.
Highland is an iceberger. He says that reported computer-related crimes are “just the tip of the iceberg,” that the annual loot is at least $750 million and more likely reaches the billions. Another expert wrote a crime article livened up with a drawing of the Titanic. Meanwhile, the Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association pooh-poohs all but the more conservative estimates. “Computer crime is not now, never has been, and never will be out of control,” an association official once said, “unless security is completely ignored. And that is not going to happen.”
“If that’s your opinion, sir,” counters Captain Zap, the computer felon now working as a security consultant, “why are fourteen-year-olds getting on defense networks? And what about adult criminals doing their thing on banks?”
Also, how about computer crimes against small business?
“No one’s going to find out why Joe Blow goes out of business,” says Ken Churbuck, a New Hampshire lawyer and former computer engineer, who believes that electronic crime may be the downfall of many more small businessmen than supposed. “You think Joe Blow can afford an investigation? You think anyone else wants to autopsy the corpse?”