For a slightly different Three Paper Thursday, I’m pulling together some of the work done by our Centre and others around the COVID-19 pandemic and how it, and government responses to it, are reshaping the cybercrime landscape. 

The first thing to note is that there appears to be a nascent academic consensus emerging that the pandemic, or more accurately, lockdowns and social distancing, have indeed substantially changed the topology of crime in contemporary societies, leading to an increase in cybercrime and online fraud. The second is that this large-scale increase in cybercrime appears to be the result of a growth in existing cybercrime phenomena rather than the emergence of qualitatively new exploits, scams, attacks, or crimes. This invites reconsideration not only of our understandings of cybercrime and its relation to space, time, and materiality, but additionally to our understandings of what to do about it.