U.S. and EU Legislation on Cybercrime

Abstract

The advent of Internet technologies has created global cyber crime problems. Cyber crimes affect all of us at the time when online transactions are in billions of dollars per year and cyber criminals are costing e-commerce billions of dollars in damages [1]. These are the components of cyber crime through which cyber criminals have perpetrated these areas: hacking, distributed denial-of-service, phishing, spoofing, identity theft and credit card fraud which have increased in frequency over time. As e-commerce and online businesses are dominating today's business world and as new technologies emerges cyber crime has a bigger impact on the global economy. The U.S. legal systems and law enforcement agencies seem to be lagging behind in their efforts to capture and prosecute cyber criminals. This paper reviews both U.S. and EU cyber legislations and how effective they are in controlling cyber crimes. The factors affecting U.S. from taking a leadership role in fighting cyber crime is reviewed. EU legislations are compared to see if U.S. can benefit from EU Convention approach.