What is computer crime? Computer crime, often called “cyber crime” is any type of illegal activity that takes place on a computer with a network. Oftentimes, when you think of computer crime, you might picture a home user downloading a virus that wipes out his hard drive or spyware that hijacks her system for the purposes of spying. 

Computer crimes can also affect businesses too and they do, sometimes with devastating results. For example, in 2012, the IRS paid a whopping 5.2 billion dollars in tax refunds to identity thieves!

Protect your business and improve your bottom line by staying one step ahead of the cybercriminals.

5 Common Computer Crimes

The World Wide Web is a fun place to connect with old friends, make new ones, and stay involved in social media. It can also be a dangerous place for those who don’t know how to be safe on the web. Children, teenagers, and young adults with Asperger’s syndrome are especially vulnerable to fraud, sexual predators, and other online dangers.

What is Asperger’s Syndrome?

Asperger’s syndrome is a pervasive developmental disorder on the autistic spectrum. Children, teenagers, and adults with this developmental disorder are not sick. They’re brains are wired differently from people who are not on the spectrum. In the autistic community, people who are not on the spectrum are referred to as neurotypical.

The reason Internet dangers are so much more of a risk for people with Asperger’s syndrome is because of the symptoms associated with it. The best way to describe Asperger’s to someone who is not familiar with it is to call it a social learning disability. The parts of the brain responsible for reading facial expressions, body language, and other social cues do not function properly.

A business rule is the basic unit of rule processing in a Business Rule Management System (BRMS) and, as such, requires a fundamental understanding. Rules consist of a set of actions and a set of conditions whereby actions are the consequences of each condition statement being satisfied or true. With rare exception, conditions test the property values of objects taken from an object model which itself is gleaned from a Data Dictionary and UML diagrams. See my article on Data Dictionaries for a better understanding on this subject matter.

A simple rule takes the form:

if condition(s)

then actions.

An alternative form includes an else statement where alternate actions are executed in the event that the conditions in the if statement are not satisfied:

if condition(s)

then actions

else alternate_actions

It is not considered a best prectice to write rules via nested if-then-else statements as they tend to be difficult to understand, hard to maintain and even harder to extend as the depth of these statements increases; in other words, adding if statements within a then clause makes it especially hard to determine which if statement was executed when looking at a bucket of rules. Moreoever, how can we determine whether the if or the else statement was satisfied without having to read the rule itself. Rules such as these are often organized into simple rule statements and provided with a name so that when reviewing rule execution logs one can determine which rule fired and not worry about whether the if or else statement was satisfied. Another limitation of this type of rule processing is that it does not take full advantage of rule inferencing and may have a negative performance impact on the Rete engine execution. Take a class with HSG and find out why.

Rule Conditions

Data has always been important to business. While it wasn't long ago that businesses kept minimal information on people who bought their products, nowadays companies keep vast amounts of data. In the late 20th century, marketers began to take demographics seriously. It was hard to keep track of so much information without the help of computers.

Only large companies in the '60s and '70s could afford the research necessary to deliver real marketing insight. The marketers of yesteryear relied upon focus groups and expensive experiments to gauge consumer behavior in a controlled environment. Today even the smallest of companies can have access to a rich array of real-world data about their consumers' behavior and their consumers. The amount of data that is stored today dwarfs the data of only a few years ago by several orders of magnitude.

So what kind of information are businesses storing for marketing purposes? Some examples include:

- Demographic information — age, gender, ethnicity, education, occupation and various other individual characteristics.