By Craig S Wright

Cybercrime has become a pervasive and complex issue in today’s interconnected world, posing significant threats to individuals, businesses, and governments. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the diverse aspects related to cybercrime, including its historical context, demographic and geographic dimensions, environmental influences, and preventive strategies. This review provides a holistic overview of the multifaceted dimensions of cybercrime. By understanding its historical context, demographic and geographic aspects, environmental influences, and preventive strategies, policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and researchers can work collaboratively to combat cyber threats effectively. Such a comprehensive approach will help create a safer digital environment and protect individuals, organizations, and societies from the adverse impacts of cybercrime. Moreover, through ongoing research and collaboration, it is possible to develop innovative solutions and adapt to the evolving landscape of cyber threats, ensuring a secure and resilient digital future.

Unpublished paper, 2023. 54p.

By Charlotte Hunn, Paul Watters, Jeremy Prichard, Richard Wortley, Joel Scanlan, Caroline Spiranovic and Tony Krone

Online CSAM offending is a challenge for law enforcement, policymakers and child welfare organisations alike. The use of online warning messages to prevent or deter an individual when they actively search for CSAM is gaining traction as a response to some types of CSAM offending. Yet, to date, the technical question of how warning messages can be implemented, and who can implement them, has been largely unexplored. To address this, we use a case study to analyse the actions individuals and organisations within the technology, government, non-government and private sectors could take to implement warning messages. We find that, from a technical perspective, there is considerable opportunity to implement warning messages, although further research into efficacy and cost is needed.

Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 669. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. 2023. 14p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

BY DAVID S. WALL

Looking at the full range of cybercrime, and computer security he shows how the increase in personal computing power available within a globalized communications network has affected the nature of and response to criminal activities. We have now entered the world of low impact, multiple victim crimes in which bank robbers, for example, no longer have to meticulously plan the theft of millions of dollars. New technological capabilities at their disposal now mean that one person can effectively commit millions of robberies of one dollar each. Against this background, David Wall scrutinizes the regulatory challenges that cybercrime poses for the criminal (and civil) justice processes, at both the national and the international levels.

Polity, 2007, 276 pages

Editor(s): D. Asher Ghertner, Hudson McFann, Daniel M. Goldstein

Security is a defining characteristic of our age and the driving force behind the management of collective political, economic, and social life. Directed at safeguarding society against future peril, security is often thought of as the hard infrastructures and invisible technologies assumed to deliver it: walls, turnstiles, CCTV cameras, digital encryption, and the like. The contributors to Futureproof redirect this focus, showing how security is a sensory domain shaped by affect and image as much as rules and rationalities. They examine security as it is lived and felt in domains as varied as real estate listings, active-shooter drills, border crossings, landslide maps, gang graffiti, and museum exhibits to theorize how security regimes are expressed through aesthetic forms. Taking a global perspective with studies ranging from Jamaica to Jakarta and Colombia to the U.S.-Mexico border ;Futureproof expands our understanding of the security practices, infrastructures, and technologies that pervade everyday life.

Contributors: Victoria Bernal, Jon Horne Carter, Alexandra Demshock, Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, Didier Fassin, D. Asher Ghertner, Daniel M. Goldstein, Rachel Hall, Rivke Jaffe, Ieva Jusionyte, Catherine Lutz, Alejandra Leal Martínez, Hudson McFann, Limor Samimian-Darash, AbdouMaliq Simone, Austin Zeiderman

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 312p.

By Julia Deeb-Swihart

Human trafficking is a serious crime that continues to plague the United States. With the rise of computing technologies, the internet has become one of the main mediums through which this crime is facilitated. Fortunately, these online activities leave traces which are invaluable to law enforcement agencies trying to stop human trafficking. However, identifying and intervening with these cases is still a challenging task. The sheer volume of online activity makes it difficult for law enforcement to efficiently identify any potential leads. To compound this issue, traffickers are constantly changing their techniques online to evade detection. Thus, there is a need for tools to efficiently sift through all this online data and narrow down the number of potential leads that a law enforcement agency can deal with. While some tools and prior research do exist for this purpose, none of these tools adequately address law enforcement user needs for information visualizations and spatiotemporal analysis. Thus to address these gaps, this thesis contributes an empirical study of technology and human trafficking. Through in-depth qualitative interviews, systemic literature analysis, and a user-centered design study, this research outlines the challenges and design considerations for developing sociotechnical tools for anti-trafficking efforts. This work further contributes to the greater understanding of the prosecution efforts within the anti-trafficking domain and concludes with the development of a visual analytics prototype that incorporates these design considerations.

Dissertation. Atlanta: Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022.

By John Aloysius, Ankur Arora, Viswanath Venkatesh

Purpose: Retailers are implementing technology-enabled mobile checkout processes in their stores to improve service quality, decrease labor costs and gain operational efficiency. These new checkout processes have increased customer convenience primarily by providing them autonomy in sales transactions in that store employee interventions play a reduced role. However, this autonomy has the unintended consequence of altering the checks and balances inherent in a traditional employee-assisted checkout process. Retailers, already grappling with shoplifting, with an estimated annual cost of billions of dollars, fear that the problem may be exacerbated by mobile checkout and concomitant customer autonomy. The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of mobile checkout processes in retail stores on cybercrime in the form of shoplifting enabled by a technology transformed the retail environment. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted an online survey of a US sample recruited from a crowdsourced platform. The authors test a research model that aims to understand the factors that influence the intention to shoplift in three different mobile checkout settings − namely, smartphone checkout settings, store-provided mobile device checkout settings, and employee-assisted mobile checkout settings − and compare it with a traditional fixed location checkout setting. Findings: The authors found that, in a smartphone checkout setting, intention to shoplift was driven by experiential beliefs and peer influence, and experiential beliefs and peer influence had a stronger effect for prospective shoplifters when compared to experienced shoplifters; in a store-provided mobile devices checkout setting, experiential beliefs had a negative effect on shoplifters’ intention to shoplift and the effect was weaker for prospective shoplifters when compared to experienced shoplifters. The results also indicated that in an employee-assisted mobile checkout setting, intention to shoplift was driven by experiential beliefs and peer influence, and experiential beliefs had a stronger effect for prospective shoplifters when compared to experienced shoplifters. Originality/value: This study is the among the first, if not first, to examine shoplifters’ intention to shoplift in mobile checkout settings. We provide insights into how those who may not have considered shoplifting in less favorable criminogenic settings may change their behavior due to the autonomy provided by mobile checkout settings and also provide an understanding of the shoplifting intention for both prospective and experienced shoplifters in different mobile checkout settings.

Information Technology and People, April 2019, 32(5):1234-1261

By Ella Busch and Jacob Ware    

In an ever-evolving technological landscape, digital disinformation is on the rise, as are its political consequences. In this policy brief, we explore the creation and distribution of synthetic media by malign actors, specifically a form of artificial intelligence-machine learning (AI/ML) known as the deepfake. Individuals looking to incite political violence are increasingly turning to deepfakes– specifically deepfake video content–in order to create unrest, undermine trust in democratic institutions and authority figures, and elevate polarised political agendas. We present a new subset of individuals who may look to leverage deepfake technologies to pursue such goals: far right extremist (FRE) groups. Despite their diverse ideologies and worldviews, we expect FREs to similarly leverage deepfake technologies to undermine trust in the American government, its leaders, and various ideological ‘out-groups.' We also expect FREs to deploy deepfakes for the purpose of creating compelling radicalising content that serves to recruit new members to their causes. Political leaders should remain wary of the FRE deepfake threat and look to codify federal legislation banning and prosecuting the use of harmful synthetic media. On the local level, we encourage the implementation of “deepfake literacy” programs as part of a wider countering violent extremism (CVE) strategy geared towards at-risk communities. Finally, and more controversially, we explore the prospect of using deepfakes themselves in order to “call off the dogs” and undermine the conditions allowing extremist groups to thrive.  

The Hague?:  International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), 2023.