Categorising Cybercrime and Cybercriminals: The Problem and Potential Approaches
ABSTRACT
Cybercrime is now recognised as a major international problem, with continual increases in incidents of hacking, viruses, and other forms of abuse having been reported in recent years. However, although many people may recognise cybercrime-related terminology, agreeing and defining what they actually mean can prove to be somewhat difficult. As a result, alternative classifications have emerged from a range of authoritative sources, which are similar in some respects, but markedly different in others. This paper considers the difficulty associated with categorising cybercrime, and identifies that a harmonised nomenclature would be beneficial to individuals and organisations concerned with combating the problem, as well as to those concerned with reporting the issue to the general public.
The discussion presents a variety of different top-level classifications of cybercrime, each of which has been utilised in practice by authoritative sources in the field. The need for further sub classification is then illustrated by examining the specific issue of hacking, which reveals that numerous types and motivations can be identified, and that the simple, yet frequently used, label of ‘hacker’ is consequently inappropriate to convey any real impression of the activities in many cases.
AUTHORS
School of Computer Science University of Nottingham,
Nottingham, United Kingdom
Steven Furnell is a professor of cyber security at the University of Nottingham. He is also an Honorary Professor with Nelson Mandela University in South Africa and an Adjunct Professor with Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. His research interests include: usability of security and privacy, security management and culture, and technologies for user authentication and intrusion detection. He has authored over 340 papers in refereed international journals and conference proceedings, as well as books including Cybercrime: Vandalizing the Information Society and Computer Insecurity: Risking the System. Prof. Furnell is the Chair of Technical Committee 11 (security and privacy) within the International Federation for Information Processing, and a board member of the Chartered Institute of Information Security.
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Journal of Information Warfare
The definitive publication for the best and latest research and analysis on information warfare, information operations, and cyber crime. Available in traditional hard copy or online.
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