As the use of information technology spread throughout the world, as computers spread, and as the computer users increase, computer-related crimes swell. Values and ethics in businesses as well as education will thus become even more important. This paper provides a statistical study, via ethical scenarios, to illustrate the relation between computer crimes and the influence of religion, in particular Islam. This study focuses on the attitudes on the computer science students. The scenarios are designed to cover all the categories of the computer crimes, as well as, the elicitation of the ethically correct answers. Data reliability is also considered. Accordingly to the four dimensions of Hofstede (or five as he added later, the time factor) by which the national cultures differ, especially the individualism, there is a strong relation between the religious man and the avoidance of all the categories of the computer crimes.

Keywords:

Computer crimes, Islamic religion, cross-cultural research.

Computer Science Department

King Abdul Aziz University

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia