International Journal of Information Management 24 (2004) 551–561 Case study Computer crime at CEFORMA:acasestudy Gurpreet Dhillon a,Ã , Leiser Silva b , James Backhouse c a School of Business, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA b C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA c London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK 1. Introduction Whenever an organisation experiences a computer-related crime, panic strikes and usually not muchthoughtisgiventothekindofcontrolsthatcouldbeputinplace.Asaresult,management tends to operate in a reactive mode, building on short-term gains rather than identifying long- termoptionsorthepotentialnegativeconsequencesoftheiractions.Anyoccurrenceofcomputer crime is a serious event for an organisation which could have disastrous consequences. It is important therefore to analyse all possible causes and effects. Computer-relatedcrimeisnotjustonetypeofcrime;itisanubiquitousvariantofallcrime.It has been contended that ultimately this variant will become a dominant form (Parker, 1983). Indeed,themythofcomputer-relatedcrimehasbecomesodistortedandexaggeratedthatthereal problems are not being addressed. According to Sieber (1986) the real problems relate to the ‘‘precise knowledge of the rapid changes regarding the phenomena and characteristics of computer crime’’. This paper is an attempt to understand the problems related with managing computer-related crime. It argues that organisations which focus exclusively on technical and formal control measures in their systems fall short of protecting their resources. Hence it is proposed that organisations should focus more on the pragmatic control measures (for other research sympathetic with this viewpoint see Dhillon & Backhouse, 2000; Siponen & Baskerville, 2001; Hitchings, 1996). The argument of this paper is conducted by analysing the ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/ijinfomgt 0268-4012/$-see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2004.08.009 Ã Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-804-828-3183; fax: +1-804-828-3199. E-mail addresses: gdhillon@vcu.edu (G. Dhillon), lsilva@uh.edu (L. Silva), j.p.backhouse@lse.ac.uk (J. Backhouse).