Understanding Cybercrime

• Cybercrime is discussed in politics, society, and the media.
• Criminologists question cybercrime, the internet's growth, and how offending opportunities rise.
• Cybercrime's definition, classification, and novelty are examined
• Challenges for criminology and criminal justice systems presented by cybercrime are explored

Key Terms Defined

• Anonymity: The state of not being identified or known by name
• Cybercrime: Criminal activities carried out using computers or the internet
• Cyberspace: The notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs.
• E-commerce: Commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet.
• Globalization: The process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale.
• Hacking: Gaining unauthorized access to a computer system or network.
• Information Society: A society in which the creation, distribution, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity.
• Internet: A global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols.
• Internet of Things (IoT): The interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data.
• Moral Panic: A feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society.
• Piracy: The unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted material.
• Policing: The activities of maintaining order or enforcing the law.
• Pornography: Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic feelings.
• Representations of Crime: The ways in which crime and criminals are depicted and portrayed in media, art, and popular culture.
• Social Inclusion and Social Exclusion: The process of improving the terms on which individuals and groups take part in society and improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of those disadvantaged.
• Stalking: Repeatedly harassing or threatening someone.
• Surveillance: Close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal.
• Transnational Crime and Policing: Crime that takes place across national borders
• Viruses: A piece of code which is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.

Perceptions of Cybercrime

• Crime and criminality related to electronic communication growth has exploded in recent decades
• The internet has become a global phenomenon, transforming business, work, consumption, leisure, and politics.
• The Information Age has brought new opportunities and challenges, but also new threats and dangers.
• Cyberspace offers vast opportunities for criminal and deviant activities.
• Fears about cybercrime's darker dimensions have grown since the internet's popularization.
• Businesses face economic threats like vandalism, e-fraud, and piracy.
• Governments worry about cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism, especially post-9/11 and during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Parents are concerned about online safety, especially regarding paedophiles stalking social networks.
• Computer users face attacks from viruses and malicious software.
• Advocates of democratic rights fear state surveillance and control via the internet.
• Mass media plays a role in raising awareness of the internet's criminal dimensions.
• News media identifies and intensifies public concerns, reporting internet-related threats.
• News coverage of cybercrime has increased significantly over time.
• Coverage of cyberterrorism has risen, especially after 2010.
• Broadcast media like radio and TV, and the internet itself, report on cybercrime.
• Popular fiction has dramatized the internet's problematic side, highlighting threats from individuals and authorities.
• Rapid social, economic, and technological changes provoke cultural anxieties and fears about familiar life.
• Cybercrime is used as titillating entertainment that generates fear about technology's power
• Social transformation by internet technologies makes the future seem insecure, leading to public and political reaction
• Moral panics create excessive fears about threats to society.
• Popular representations of the internet depict a cyber-dystopian outlook.
• Internet-related panics include pornography effects, child safety, and social media impact.
• Rapid shifts and reconstructions cause anxieties, though cybercrime dangers should not be dismissed
• Media representations are important for criminological research, revealing how cybercrime is constructed, defined, and shaped.
• Representations can obscure criminal activity realities and impacts, hindering understanding.

Questions & Answers About Cybercrime

• Cybercrime requires a balanced view to sift fact from fantasy
• Scholars have made strides in understanding Cybercrime by using analysis and empirical investigation
• Key questions include:
  • What are cybercrimes?
  • What is the scope and scale of cybercrimes?
  • How are cybercrimes like/unlike offline offenses?
  • Who are cybercriminals?
  • What causes and motivates cybercriminals?
  • What are the experiences of cybercrime victims?
  • What challenges do cybercrimes pose for criminal justice and law enforcement?
  • How are policymakers, legislators, police, courts, and businesses responding?
  • How are responses shaped by computer crime perceptions?
  • How does cybercrime shape the internet's future?
• Extensive literature addresses cybercrime from diverse disciplines.
• Cybercrime is a diverse range of illicit activities in a unique electronic environment.
• Studies focus on selected aspects of cybercrime.
• Theoretical and empirical contributions from different areas of scholarship are used to analyze cybercrime.
• The focus of this study is on criminology and sociology.
• Cybercriminal activity such as hacking, e-fraud, cyber-stalking and cyberterrorism are analyzed in a context
• General matters such as tensions between internet security and policing, individual rights, freedoms, and liberties are considered
• More in-depth readings will be provided

History & Analysis of the Internet

• The internet provides the electronic environment for cybercrime
• The internet's form is based on how people use it
• Social uses of the internet create criminal and deviant activity possibilities.
• Internet shopping creates credit card crime opportunities, potentially risking millions of people's data.
• Internet use for communication leads to email viruses causing disruption and damage.
• The internet is a network that links computers for communication and information exchange
• The internet links diverse existing networks, enabling communication between all 'nodes'
• The internet's origins trace back to the 1950s US military's SAGE system, an early warning system
• SAGE linked radar stations, computers, and interceptors to defend against bomber strikes
• SAGE laid the foundation for networking computers
• In the 1960s, DARPA explored computer networking systems, resulting in ARPANET
• ARPANET aimed to enable secure military communication and coordination
• ARPANET's technology broke communications into 'packets' sent via different routes
• New computer hardware and protocols were required to create the network

The Growing Internet

• In the late 1960's development began and by 1969 the ARPANET was linking university research communities with government agencies.
• In the early 1970s, innovations like email applications allowed communication.
• Networks paralleling ARPANET such as UK's JANET and US NSFNET were established.
• Connecting networks with common protocols formed the internet.
• In 1990, the US released ARPANET to civilian control, under the NSF.
• The same year, the WWW web browser was developed by CERN researchers in Switzerland.
• The WWW was elaborated on by other programmers, allowing sophisticated info exchange such as the sharing of images and text.
• The first commercial browser, Netscape Navigator, launched in 1994, with Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer the following year.
• These browsers made PC internet access possible
• Early ARPANET businesses didn't see the internet's commercial potential.
• By the mid-1990s, ISPs offered internet connections via computer and telephone line
• The internet became commercialized in the mid-1990s with rapid growth.
• Between 1994-1999 the connected countries almost tripled.
• The total number of internet users increased to 580 million by May 2002.
• In June 2017 users had reached 3.89 billion. However, internet access remains uneven between/within countries.
• Estimated households in Europe with internet access is 84.2 per cent.
• Estimated households in Africa with internet access is 18 per cent.
• Unequal access reflects employment, income, education, ethnicity and disability.
• Inequalities are important to understand both potential offenders and their victims
• Social practices create opportunities for offending
• Internet criminal opportunities includes theft of trade secrets, disruption of selling systems, and fraudulent use of credit cards
• Internet political activity is used by governments, political parties and pressure groups
• Cybercrimes are political, for example sabotage and defacement of websites, instigation of hate campaigns, activities of terrorist groups
• The demand for certain goods creates opportunities for offending, for example distribution of obscene imagery, trade in pirate recordings and software
• Social media platforms generate new patterns of misuse and abuse

Other Aspects

• The IoT introduces new patterns of internet use.
• The IoT includes devices like fitness bands, smartwatches, kitchen appliances etc.
• These can allow the provision of additional services.
• Illegitimate online activities must be seen in context.
• Each development coincides with licit and illicit uses.
• 'Surface web' is content indexed through search engines
• The term 'deep web' is content not indexed in search engines, for example info secured behind paywalls
• The 'dark web' is a collection of thousands of websites that hide their IP addresses (Greenberg, 2014)
• The key distinction is that dark websites hide the IP addresses of the servers that run them (ibid).
• Dark web tools protect user geo-location data.
• The dark web provides secrecy also for political activists to avoid surveillance and censure

Defining & Classifying Cybercrime

• Generating consensus may be difficult because of the ambiguous nature of the 'cyber' prefix
• Term originally coined by Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth
• Wiener and his contemporaries focused used the term to focus on machines that could reciprocally interact with their environments.
• Cyber became popular describing anything computer related.
• Use of cyber soared in the 1980s where it would resurface to describe science fiction and associated concepts (Gordon et al., 2022) (Gibson, 2013).
• Cyberhype' is the use of prefixes to give the illusion of explanatory power (Wark).
• Certain uses of cyber were 'pregnant with the promise of technology are now used to connote the dangers of the internet (Steinmetz, Nobles 2018: 3; Wall, 2012: 5).
• Cyber has become a commonplace term in criminology to describe computer network-related crimes.
• Problem is the absence of a consistent current definition

More Definitions & Classifications

• Conceptualize cybercrime as those 'computer-mediated activities which are either illegal or illict"
• 'computer-assisted crimes' (crimes that pre-date the internet, renew online, e.g., fraud, theft, money laundering, sexual harassment, hate speech, pornography) and ‘computer-focused crimes' (crimes that have emerged in tandem with the internet, couldn't exist apart from it, e.g., hacking, viral attacks, website defacement).
• Kinds of classification is is adopted by police, for example the UK's Unit and the National Cyber Security Centre
• Main way to subdivide cybercrime is according to the role played by the technology – contingent or necessary
• According to criminal law cybercrime is divided into categories such as:
  • Cyber-trespass
  • Cyber-deceptions
  • Cyber-pornography
  • Cyber-violence Such classification sub-divides cybercrime according to the target of the offence:
  • crimes against property
  • crimes against morality
  • crimes against the person
  • crimes against the state

New About Cybercrime?

• Focuses on cybercrime being continuous with 'terrestrial' crimes
• Fails to isolate what is qualitatively new about cybercrimes
• For some, cybercrime is just 'old wine in new bottles' (Grabosky).
• Others find novelty in the social-structural features of cyberspace.
• Alters the relationships between offenders and victims, and the ability of criminal justice systems to respond (Capeller, 2001).
• Emphasizes the ability of offenders to target individuals and property is seemingly amplified by the internet

Explaining Cybercrime

• Criminology is based upon data relating to criminal activity in 'real-world' settings and situations
• It is not clear whether theories are compatible with cyberspace
• In cyber crime, you cannot straight forwardly divide it into distinctive spatial locations (Mitchell, 1995: 8)
• The crime problem is predominantly centred upon those who suffer social exlusion

Challenges To Police & Criminal Justice System

• Policing has historically followed the organization of life within national territories.
• Cybercrime, given the global nature of the internet, is an inherently deterritorialized phenomenon.
• The EU high-tech crime agency European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), established in 2004; restricted to coordinating but not investigations of cybercrime
• There can be limits to resources and insufficient expertise, especially the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit NHTCU
• Lack of organizational stability may disrupt efforts to effectively tackle online crime.
• Difficulties are intensified by the existence of different territories, the harmonization of internet law has already been noted.
• 159 countries have laws addressing cybercrime, amounting to over 1,300 individual pieces of legislation (UNODC, 2018a), even though the amount differs.
• Attempts to legislatey tackle cybercrime may also clash with existing national laws.
• Even where appropriate legal measures are in place, many countries lack the resources needed to enforce them.
• In conclusion, Cybercrime is simultaneously informed and obscured by political and media discussions of the problem.

This content explores the multifaceted nature of cybercrime, examining the challenges in defining it and the negative consequences of its media portrayals. It emphasizes the interdisciplinary approach required to study cybercrime, drawing from fields like criminology and computer science. The material highlights the importance of distinguishing between different aspects of cybercrime for effective analysis.