For example, the insertion of a virus may take a matter of minutes but wipe out all the data that the business has collected from its inception. I would like to look at the risks to business from computer fraud in terms of internal threats, that is to say from the business' own staff and external threats, intrusions by outsiders, possibly working in collusion with staff. There is evidence that internal fraud is a greater risk to business than external fraud. A survey carried out in May 1996 found that four out of five of the most serious frauds involved employees. One in five frauds involved collusion between an employee and an outsider.
Industrial espionage has a long and notorious history.
What is worrying about electronic information is the ease with which it can be misappropriated and the difficulty in detecting that this has happened. Not every virus outbreak is malicious. I suspect that most are accidental and result from using unauthorised software or floppy disks. The tainted floppy disk is a very common means of transmitting viruses. Instead of following the approved policy of contacting IT and doing nothing further, the disk was inserted into several other computers until one was found that did not have a virus message.