Category Archives: Cybercrime

Usability of Cybercrime Datasets

Academic papers, Cybercrime

By Ildiko Pete and Yi Ting Chua

The availability of publicly accessible datasets plays an essential role in the advancement of cybercrime and cybersecurity as a field. There has been increasing effort to understand how datasets are created, classified, shared, and used by scholars. However, there has been very few studies that address the usability of datasets. 

As part of an ongoing project to improve the accessibility of cybersecurity and cybercrime datasets, we conducted a case study that examined and assessed the datasets offered by the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre (CCC). We examined two stages of the data sharing process: dataset sharing and dataset usage. Dataset sharing refers to three steps: (1) informing potential users of available datasets, (2) providing instructions on application process, and (3) granting access to users. Dataset usage refers to the process of querying, manipulation and extracting data from the dataset. We were interested in assessing users’ experiences with the data sharing process and discovering challenges and difficulties when using any of the offered datasets. 

To this end, we reached out to 65 individuals who applied for access to the CCC’s datasets and are potentially actively using the datasets. The survey questionnaire was administered via Qualtrics. We received sixteen responses, nine of which were fully completed. The responses to open-ended questions were transcribed, and then we performed thematic analysis.

As a result, we discovered two main themes. The first theme is users’ level of technological competence, and the second one is users’ experiences. The findings revealed generally positive user experiences with the CCC’s data sharing process and users reported no major obstacles with regards to the dataset sharing stage. Most participants have accessed and used the CrimeBB dataset, which contains more than 48 million posts. Users also expressed that they are likely to recommend the dataset to other researchers. During the dataset usage phase, users reported some technical difficulties. Interestingly, these technical issues were specific, such as version conflicts. This highlights that users with a higher level of technical skills also experience technical difficulties, however these are of different nature in contrast to generic technical challenges. Nonetheless, the survey shown the CCC’s success in sharing their datasets to a sub-set of cybercrime and cybersecurity researchers approached in the current study. 

Ildiko Pete presented the preliminary findings on 12thAugust at CSET’19. Click here to access the full paper. 

Hiring for the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre

Cybercrime, Jobs

We have just re-advertised a “post-doc” position in the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre: https://www.cambridgecybercrime.uk. The vacancy arises because Daniel is off to become a Chancellor’s Fellow at Strathclyde), the re-advertisement is because of a technical flaw in the previous advertising process (which is now addressed).

We are looking for an enthusiastic researcher to join us to work on our datasets of cybercrime activity, collecting new types of data, maintaining existing datasets and doing innovative research using our data. The person we appoint will define their own goals and objectives and pursue them independently, or as part of a team.

An ideal candidate would identify cybercrime datasets that can be collected, build the collection systems and then do cutting edge research on this data — whilst encouraging other academics to take our data and make their own contributions to the field.

We are not necessarily looking for existing experience in researching cybercrime, although this would be a bonus. However, we are looking for strong programming skills — and experience with scripting languages and databases would be much preferred. Good knowledge of English and communication skills are important.

Please follow this link to the advert to read the formal advertisement for the details about exactly who and what we’re looking for and how to apply — and please pay attention to our request that in the covering letter you create as part of the application you should explain which particular aspects of cybercrime research are of particular interest to you.

Fourth Annual Cybercrime Conference

Cybercrime, Seminars

The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre is organising another one day conference on cybercrime on Thursday, 11th July 2019.

We have a stellar group of invited speakers who are at the forefront of their fields:

They will present various aspects of cybercrime from the point of view of criminology, policy, security economics and policing.

This one day event, to be held in the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge will follow immediately after (and will be in the same venue as) the “12th International Conference on Evidence Based Policing” organised by the Institute of Criminology which runs on the 9th and 10th July 2018.

Full details (and information about booking) is here.

WEIS 2019 – Liveblog

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics, Security psychology

I’ll be trying to liveblog the seventeenth workshop on the economics of information security at Harvard. I’m not in Cambridge, Massachussetts, but in Cambridge, England, because of a visa held in ‘administrative processing’ (a fate that has befallen several other cryptographers). My postdoc Ben Collier is attending as my proxy (inspired by this and this).

The Changing Cost of Cybercrime

Academic papers, Banking security, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics

In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. We have now repeated our study, to work out what’s changed in the seven years since then.

Measuring the Changing Cost of Cybercrime will appear on Monday at WEIS. The period has seen huge changes, with the smartphone replacing as PC and laptop as the consumer terminal of choice, with Android replacing Windows as the most popular operating system, and many services moving to the cloud. Yet the overall pattern of cybercrime is much the same.

We know a lot more than we did then. Back in 2012, we guessed that cybercrime was about half of all crime, by volume and value; we now know from surveys in several countries that this is the case. Payment fraud has doubled, but fallen slightly as a proportion of payment value; the payment system has got larger, and slightly more efficient.

So what’s changed? New cybercrimes include ransomware and other offences related to cryptocurrencies; travel fraud has also grown. Business email compromise and its cousin, authorised push payment fraud, are also growth areas. We’ve also seen serious collateral damage from cyber-weapons such as the NotPetya worm. The good news is that crimes that infringe intellectual property – from patent-infringing pharmaceuticals to copyright-infringing software, music and video – are down.

Our conclusions are much the same as in 2012. Most cyber-criminals operate with impunity, and we have to fix this. We need to put a lot more effort into catching and punishing the perpetrators.

Our new paper is here. For comparison the 2012 paper is here, while a separate study on the emotional cost of cybercrime is here.

Security Engineering: Third Edition

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Internet censorship, Legal issues, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security engineering

I’m writing a third edition of my best-selling book Security Engineering. The chapters will be available online for review and feedback as I write them.

Today I put online a chapter on Who is the Opponent, which draws together what we learned from Snowden and others about the capabilities of state actors, together with what we’ve learned about cybercrime actors as a result of running the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. Isn’t it odd that almost six years after Snowden, nobody’s tried to pull together what we learned into a coherent summary?

There’s also a chapter on Surveillance or Privacy which looks at policy. What’s the privacy landscape now, and what might we expect from the tussles over data retention, government backdoors and censorship more generally?

There’s also a preface to the third edition.

As the chapters come out for review, they will appear on my book page, so you can give me comment and feedback as I write them. This collaborative authorship approach is inspired by the late David MacKay. I’d suggest you bookmark my book page and come back every couple of weeks for the latest instalment!

Hiring for the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre

Cybercrime, Jobs

We have yet another “post-doc” position in the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre: https://www.cambridgecybercrime.uk (for the happy reason that Daniel is off to become a Chancellor’s Fellow at Strathclyde).

We are looking for an enthusiastic researcher to join us to work on our datasets of cybercrime activity, collecting new types of data, maintaining existing datasets and doing innovative research using our data. The person we appoint will define their own goals and objectives and pursue them independently, or as part of a team.

An ideal candidate would identify cybercrime datasets that can be collected, build the collection systems and then do cutting edge research on this data — whilst encouraging other academics to take our data and make their own contributions to the field.

We are not necessarily looking for existing experience in researching cybercrime, although this would be a bonus. However, we are looking for strong programming skills — and experience with scripting languages and databases would be much preferred. Good knowledge of English and communication skills are important.

Please follow this link to the advert to read the formal advertisement for the details about exactly who and what we’re looking for and how to apply — and please pay attention to our request that in the covering letter you create as part of the application you should explain which particular aspects of cybercrime research are of particular interest to you.

Does security advice discriminate against women?

Academic papers, Banking security, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Security psychology

Security systems are often designed by geeks who assume that the users will also be geeks, and the same goes for the advice that users are given when things start to go wrong. For example, banks reacted to the growth of phishing in 2006 by advising their customers to parse URLs. That’s fine for geeks but most people don’t do that, and in particular most women don’t do that. So in the second edition of my Security Engineering book, I asked (in chapter 2, section 2.3.4, pp 27-28): “Is it unlawful sex discrimination for a bank to expect its customers to detect phishing attacks by parsing URLs?”

Tyler Moore and I then ran the experiment, and Tyler presented the results at the first Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour that June. We recruited 132 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 (77 female, 55 male) and tested them to see whether they could spot phishing websites, as well as for systematising quotient (SQ) and empathising quotient (EQ). These measures were developed by Simon Baron-Cohen in his work on Asperger’s; most men have SQ > EQ while for most women EQ > SQ. The ability to parse URLs is correlated with SQ-EQ and independently with gender. A significant minority of women did badly at URL parsing. We didn’t get round to publishing the full paper at the time, but we’ve mentioned the results in various talks and lectures.

We have now uploaded the original paper, How brain type influences online safety. Given the growing interest in gender HCI, we hope that our study might spur people to do research in the gender aspects of security as well. It certainly seems like an open goal!