Page 49 - Cyber Defense eMagazine - September 2017

The link between corruption and cyber defense

by Milica D. Djekic

The corruption is a financial crime covering on the misuse of public authority for a private gain.
It’s a sort of criminality that costs the global economy about 5% of the world’s gross domestic
product (GDP). The current methodologies in corruption’s estimation are not exact enough and
they rather deal with some perceptions and less accurate measurements. The purpose of this
article would not be to suggest the new techniques in corruption’s estimations, because our
point would be to try to correlate the corruption with the cyber defense. Before we do so, we
would want to highlight that the corruption is a quite unfair way of dealing within a society. It’s
not that hard to imagine how people could get affected if someone being willing to pay the bribe
would obtain some sort of advantage over the people not being willing to corrupt someone with
the public power. The corruption is especially the concern in developing economies where the
society is not sufficiently mature to cope with this sort of a challenge. Indeed, we could say that
the corruption is the both – financial and security issue, for a reason it would so deeply affect
any kind of human activities. In other words, this social phenomenon would get capable to
cause some sort of avalanche effect to the entire community. For instance, if we talk about the
insider’s threats dealing with the corruption – it’s quite clear that one person receiving the bribe
in order to steal the confidential information out of his organization and offer them to the
defense’s threats or competitors could pull down the entire organization and threaten the rest of
employees and their families. From that perspective, it’s quite obvious that the socio-economical
impacts of corruption could be huge and very serious to the entire economy. The aim of this
paper would be to make a closer look to the corruption as a social, financial and security
challenge as well as explain how we could reduce it relying on the cyber technologies.

The corruption is a crime that can
occur anywhere. In order to better
research the corruption, we would
use the resources being available on
the Transparency International
webpage. As it’s known, that
organization is a global leader in
combating the corruption and
bribery, so we believe such gathered
information could support us in a
quite good understanding of that
problem. We would say that the
corruption is a challenge. Those are
quite true, but let’s try to explain
what that means. The challenge is
not an irresolvable concern. It’s
rather the problem seeking more
time and effort to get tackled. It’s quite important to mention that the corruption as a global
challenge needs the international collaboration that would support us to approach the concern
appropriately and comprehensively. What does that mean in a practice? The corruption may
happen in some society and include a stealing of valuable information from some organization,
governmental institution or business asset. The people committing such a crime could offer their
services on the black market. In this case, we are talking about the insider’s threats. Those guys

49 Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2017 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide.