Depictions of cybercrime often revolve around the figure of the lone ‘hacker’, a skilled artisan who builds their own tools and has a deep mastery of technical systems. However, much of the work involved is now in fact more akin to a deviant customer service or maintenance job. This means that exit from cybercrime communities is less often via the justice system, and far more likely to be a simple case of burnout.
Continue reading Cybercrime is (still) (often) boringAll posts by Ben Collier
Friendly neighbourhood cybercrime: online harm in the pandemic and the futures of cybercrime policing
As cybercrime researchers we’re often focused on the globalised aspects of online harms – how the Internet connects people and services around the world, opening up opportunities for crime, risk, and harm on a global scale. However, as we argue in open access research published this week in the Journal of Criminal Psychology in collaboration between the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre (CCC), Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Edinburgh, and Abertay University, as we have seen an enormous rise in reported cybercrime in the pandemic, we have paradoxically seen this dominated by issues with a much more local character. Our paper sketches a past: of cybercrime in a turbulent 2020, and a future: of the roles which state law enforcement might play in tackling online harm a post-pandemic world.
Continue reading Friendly neighbourhood cybercrime: online harm in the pandemic and the futures of cybercrime policingThree paper Thursday: COVID-19 and cybercrime
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.
Continue reading Three paper Thursday: COVID-19 and cybercrimeCybercrime is (often) boring
Much has been made in the cybersecurity literature of the transition of cybercrime to a service-based economy, with specialised services providing Denial of Service attacks, cash-out services, escrow, forum administration, botnet management, or ransomware configuration to less-skilled users. Despite this acknowledgement of the ‘industrialisation’ of much for the cybercrime economy, the picture of cybercrime painted by law enforcement and media reports is often one of ’sophisticated’ attacks, highly-skilled offenders, and massive payouts. In fact, as we argue in a recent paper accepted to the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security this year (and covered in KrebsOnSecurity last week), cybercrime-as-a-service relies on a great deal of tedious, low-income, and low-skilled manual administrative work.
Continue reading Cybercrime is (often) boringThree Paper Thursday: The role of intermediaries, platforms, and infrastructures in governing crime and abuse
The platforms, providers, and infrastructures which together make up the contemporary Internet play an increasingly central role in the business of governing human societies. Although the software engineers, administrators, business professionals, and other staff working at these organisations may not have the institutional powers of state organisations such as law enforcement or the civil service, they are now in a powerful position of responsibility for the harms and illegal activities which their platforms facilitate. For this Three Paper Thursday, I’ve chosen to highlight papers which address these issues, and which explore the complex networks of different infrastructural actors and perspectives which play a role in the reporting, handling, and defining of abuse and crime online.
Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: The role of intermediaries, platforms, and infrastructures in governing crime and abuse