Cybercrimes prevention: promising organisational practices
Mahmood Hussain Shah, Paul Jones, Jyoti Choudrie · Information Technology and People · 2019
Cybercrimes prevention: promising organisational practices Contextualising the special issueThe growth of e-commerce worldwide has enabled many organisations to deliver products and services using innovative, efficient, fast and cost effective business models.The digital economy continues to grow and makes a considerable contribution to the world economy.However, this relatively rapid growth has also caused even faster growth in cybercrimes, mainly due to the ease of committing these crimes, lucrative returns and the slowness of prevention efforts.Cybercrimes represent an existential threat to e-commerce and the need to effectively control their growth is urgent.As the relevant legislation and capabilities of law enforcement agencies is failing to catch up with the fast changing nature of crimes, businesses need to adopt innovative preventative strategies.This special issue focuses on how both large organisations and SMEs are making effective use of cybercrime prevention strategies.It also presents new research approaches and methodologies contributing to the theory and practice in this important emerging research domain.Bera (2019) gave worldwide figures for cybercrimes for the year 2018, stating that almost 700m people were victims of some type of cybercrime.Cybercriminals generate revenues of $1.5tn annually and cybercrime is estimated to cost $6tnn businesses annually by 2021.Generally, when calculating cybercrimes losses, only reported direct losses are accounted for.The indirect losses such as reduction in sales, a reduction in market share, share price drop and other legal costs have a significant adverse impact on organisations; however, they are often overlooked.Many cybercrimes are not reported or are under reported by organisations because of possible reputational damage.Therefore, the figures given here could be under estimated below the real number of cybercrimes or the extent of damage.Nevertheless, these figures demonstrate how widespread these crimes are, with the resulting damages to the world economy in the trillions.Doargajudhur and Dell (2019) identify that enhanced awareness of cybercrimes and alarming media reports about losses resulting from these crimes have intensified interest and attracted the attention of consumers, organisations, governments and researchers.Moreover, Vahdati and Yasini (2015) stressed that cybercrimes are the biggest threat to the survival of e-tailing.Whereas cybercrimes are a fast-evolving problem, prevention strategies and implementation have been slow amongst businesses.The losses caused by cybercrimes can damage both the finances and reputation of businesses (Vahdati and Yasini, 2015).These crimes and resulting fears also discourage many customers from buying goods online.Spanaki et al. (2019) and Tsohou and Holtkamp (2018) identified major challenges faced by consumers when they become victims of cybercrimes.These consumers faced issues such as credit problems (including rejection of loan applications), disruption to normal life routines and psychological difficulty in providing personal data to organisations and banks during an investigation.Previous studies focused on issues related to the development and management of identity fraud policies (Njenga and Osiemo, 2013;Coulson-Thomas, 2017).Syed (2018) investigated the effects of data breaches on the reputation of organisations on social media.Moreover, Doherty and Tajuddin (2018) researched prevention approaches including identifying risks and sharing knowledge about information security with other organisations.The majority of these studies are, however, directed at internal fraud in banking and other public and private sectors; there is very limited literature available in terms of theories on cybercrime management.