Cybercriminal impacts on online business and consumer confidence

Abstract

The information revolution, coupled with the strategic leveraging of the Internet, has exposed a number of relatively open societies to the dangers of cybercriminal and cyberterrorist acts, especially in commercial business transactions. With the development of e‐commerce, this commercial dark side has become known as cybercrime and has taken on many forms that affect the perceptions of the way we shop online. Corporations should realize that these threats to their online businesses have strategic implications to their business future and take proper measures to ensure that these threats are eliminated or significantly reduced so that consumer confidence in the Internet as an alternative means of shopping is maintained. These counter measures, coined as cybersecurity, have been developed to ensure the safety of consumer privacy and information and allow for a carefree shopping experience. There is need for the development of models that will allow corporations to study the effects of cybercrime on online consumer confidence and to counter through leveraging the benefits associated with the latest developments in cybersecurity. With these two facets of e‐commerce impacting the online consumer, corporations must ensure that the security measures taken will ultimately prevail to assure that consumers will continue to use the Internet to satisfy their shopping needs.