ABSTRACT

Over the past twenty years, the Internet’s role in our lives has grown to an everyday necessity. We rely on the Internet to communicate within the scope of our employment and social lives, to conduct our banking and bill paying, we even use it to track our personal property. There is hardly one area of our lives that we can not conduct over the Internet. While the Internet is a convenience that has made our lives easier, it has also opened the door in our lives to a vulnerability that is rapidly being exploited by cyber criminals. Cyber crimes are growing at an exponential rate in the United States and we, the consumers/end users are unaware of the liabilities a simple click on the wrong button can cause. This paper will address the current cybersecurity policy issues for the protection of the Internet infrastructure and recommend new policies that will address the liability for malicious traffic traversing the Internet from the End Users. INTRODUCTION

From the year 2000 to 2010, the users’ on the Internet has escalated to approximately five times its original users. The Internet provides a variety of services in which its users transmits large amounts of proprietary and personal data. The increase in Internet users and the vital data transmitted has enticed criminals to use the internet to obtain vital information. This is done through the use of malicious traffic. Malicious traffic can be defined as Internet traffic used to compromise a system and/or to conceivably impair the privacy of consumers data stored on the system or the person working on the system itself. Security experts has documented "67,000 new malware threats on the Internet daily in the first quarter of 2011, resulting from more than 45 new viruses, worms, spyware and other threats" (Department of Commerce (DOC), 2011). Malicious traffic plays a key role in the