Impact Zones: How cybercrime disrupts and shapes the landscape of data security

Abstract

In a highly networked digital world, cybercrime and data breaches are increasing together, putting up a strong front and proving to be a challenge for everyone: individuals, organizations, and governments. Cybercrime is associated with financially motivated attacks and one type of cyberattack that is one of the most prolific is ransomware. Objectives of the study: to analyze the disruption which destabilizes and breaks the system's normal functioning. The overall horizontal objective is to identify the activities that can breach data, cause financial losses, and also can influence the cybersecurity landscape. The paper is important in this topic area because knowing about cybersecurity is the key to knowledge, advancement of research, and practical application of solutions for society. Approach: strategies and regulations are always changing, and have the main role in protecting the data and responding to cyber-attacks; but unfortunately, cyber-attacks are more present and more advanced every day, and this involves different perspectives for this type of cyberattacks, in this paper the main methods are netnography, document analysis and the case study. The results show that a large number of interconnected devices in an Internet of Things landscape enhances vectors for attacking and amplifies the complexity of data security challenges. The following research will demonstrate the fact that ransomware attacks are a part of a huge disrupting type of cyberattack and represent a critical threat to data security and cybercrime has a major role in this topic. Also, an example of data leaks is a specific case study about one of the NSA officers who tried to send classified defense information to Russia, explaining that the Snowden case is not unique in the cybersecurity landscape.