Rodrigo Duarte Favarini Silva
EC-Council University
ECCU 516 – The Hacker Mind: Profiling the IT Criminal!
Reflections about cybercrime
With the growth of the number of people connected to the internet, cybercrime has become a severe problem globally (Sarre, Lau & Chang, 2018). Some authors are suggesting ways to classify this type of crime. Grabosky (2007) ranks in crimes where the computer is used as the instrument of crime; crimes where the computer is incidental to the offence, and crimes where the computer is the target of crime. Another impressive view was developed by McGuire and Dowling (2013) classifying cybercrime into ‘cyber-enabled’ crime and ‘cyber-dependent’ crime. Cyber-enabled crimes are traditional crimes facilitated by the use of computers (McGuire and Dowling, 2013). Cyber-dependent crimes are those crimes that cannot exist without the cyber technology (McGuire and Dowling, 2013).
The cybercrime report is a challenge itself. More than 60% of attacks are undetected, and even worse, 15% of the exposed attacks are reported to enforcement agencies (Sukhai, 2004). That is the main problem, having no report, the law forces cannot start investigations. In addition to that, other reasons also challenge the cybercrime report process. Some companies still having fear to report cybercrimes due to the reputation damage (Sager, 2000), and as the report of a crime is what enables its investigation, a large number of events do not even arrive the authorities preventing any action within the law (Sager, 2000).
The chances to capture the cybercriminal is very low (Sukhai, 2004). As cybercrimes can cross borders, making each user and access point a potential victim, is difficulty to evidence and prosecute offenders who reside in countries different from their victims (Koziarski, Lee, 2020). In this regard, some countries and local laws that classify cybernetic crimes as an offence of minor importance in front of the others (Koziarski, Lee, 2020).
Even with the difficulties, we can cite an interesting report from the Police of the City of London, giving the classification of crimes, their economic impacts forms of policing crimes and conducting investigations. The report reaffirms the challenge of crimes being executed remotely and proposes the international integration of police forces to investigate and contain the advance of cybercrime (Levi, Doig, Gundur, Wall, & Williams, 2016).
References
Grabosky, P. (2007).Electronic crime. New Jersey. Prentice Hall.
Koziarski, J., & Lee, J. R. (2020). Connecting evidence-based policing and cybercrime. Policing: An International Journal, 43(1), 198-211. doi:10.1108/pijpsm-07-2019-0107
Levi, M., Doig, A., Gundur, R., Wall, D., & Williams, M. L. (2016). The implications of economic cybercrime for policing. Retrieved from http://orca.cf.ac.uk/88156/1/Economic-Cybercrime-FullReport.pdf
McGuire, M., & Dowling, S. (2013). Cyber crime: A review of the evidence. Summary of key findings and implications. Home Office Research report, 75.
Sager, I. (2000). Cyber Crime. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1000-02-20/cyber-crime
Sarre, R., Lau, L. Y., & Chang, L. Y. (2018). Responding to cybercrime: Current trends. Police Practice and Research, 19(6), 515-518. doi:10.1080/15614263.2018.1507888
Sukhai, N. B. (2004). Hacking and cybercrime. Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Information Security Curriculum Development – InfoSecCD ’04. doi:10.1145/1059524.1059553