Cyber Crime

Sizing the Opportunity for Opportunistic Cybercriminals

ABSTRACT

According to Graboske, et al ‘the fundamental principle of criminology is that crime follows opportunity, and the opportunities for theft abound in the Digital Age’. But what is the extent of this opportunity? There are numerous hacker toolkits readily available from the Internet that exploits security weaknesses in target systems. This paper presents the results of a 11⁄2- year survey of websites that tested for such weaknesses. The author examined popular ‘hacker’ toolkits and assembled a data collection toolkit that tested for 70 exploits. Whilst some 2 million websites were targeted across the 57 most populous domains, 748,000 are reported. Of these, 77% displayed susceptibility to at least one exploit. Whilst this indicates significant opportunity, it also demonstrates the lack of capable guardianship by system owners and those tasked with protecting cyberspace. The facts that ISPs’ fail to collect identification details and allows bulk system scanning are factors that facilitate the commission of cybercrime.

Published In

Volume 2, Issue 1

Written By

Ajoy Ghosh

Identity Theft the Next Generation of Fraud– How well are the Irish Protecting Themselves?

ABSTRACT

There have always been impostors who have pretended to be someone else for the purposes of theft or some other unlawful act. However with the increased use of information and communication technology (ICT) identify theft, the new way of talking about impostors, has enormously increased.  Identity theft is facilitated by the ubiquitous availability of the Internet and by the increasing tendency to store personal information digitally. As a result cyber crime has been growing rapidly and identity theft has become one of the fastest growing cyber crimes.  Combating this type of crime is not trivial and consumers, businesses, and governments need to take preventative measures to limit their potential exposure to this.  This paper focuses on consumer awareness of identity theft. The study uses an exploratory approach of measuring the self-reported behaviour of undergraduate students from different disciplines and age cohorts. These students were exposed to a number of identity theft preventative activities that were suggested by the US Federal Trade Commission.  The results are compared to a similar study carried in 2001 out by George R.M Milne.  Based on these findings, suggestions are made for improving consumer awareness of these crimes and future research is recommended.

Published In

Volume 7, Issue 1

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.

Published In

Volume 1, Issue 2

Written By

Steven Furnell

A High-level Conceptual Framework of Cyber-terrorism

ABSTRACT

Uneasiness arises from the possibility of random cyber attacks.  In the global information and network warfare battle, cyber-terrorism has become a critical concern in that terrorists may seek to strike the innocent and wreak havoc due to dependency on networked communications. However, much misconception exists over what exactly cyber-terrorism entails and the role of cyber crime and hacking.

Published In

Volume 8, Issue 1

Written By

Namosha Veerasamy

Global and National Take on State Information Warfare

ABSTRACT

Information power has a crucial effect on success and because today information is mostly stored in digital form, attempts to establish information supremacy have logically migrated into cyberspace. Information warfare, which first developed in the military and political sphere, has become, due to recent technological developments, extremely aggressive and widespread, and is now used as a tool to achieve goals in all societal spheres. Leading countries even integrate this technique into their national policies and strategies for achieving their political goals. Transference of information warfare into cyberspace has led to the combining of two of the most dangerous and least investigated forms of criminality – cybercrime and organized crime – so the dilemma how to protect ourselves from them is now even greater. The international community has been avoiding this issue and information warfare is totally neglected. The absence of legislation and the will to bring order to this area has created a situation in which anyone can use cybercrime techniques to gain information power. This paper presents the authors’ opinion on the nature of information warfare, its steady migration into cyberspace and its exponential growth. The analysis of the current normative acts at national and international levels and our overview of the developments in leading countries illuminate the present state of affairs in this field.

Published In

Volume 11, Issue 2

Factors that Influence Young Adults’ Online Security Awareness in Durban in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Online fraud is aggressively threatening individuals and some believe that it can turn into a weapon of electronic warfare in the near future. There is strong agreement that society is required to develop its own resilience against this risk (Jakobsson & Srikwan, 2008).  Vast sums are spent by both the government and business sectors on deflecting mechanisms and on cleaning up after online attacks which are becoming increasingly sophisticated and diverse (Gartner, 2009). The goal of this exploratory study was to establish what the factors that influenced online security were amongst young South African, Durban based adults. The conceptual framework used to guide this approach was Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983). Data for this study was collected via an online survey. The questionnaire was e-mailed to prospective participants at the University of KwaZulu Natal, where they could submit it electronically. The survey was also sent to the researchers Facebook friends and Twitter followers who fitted the criteria. Significant findings were that gender, race and employment status affected user awareness of online security.

Published In

Volume 12, Issue 1

To Catch a Thief in the Cloud: A Paradigm for Law Enforcement

ABSTRACT

Control over most of the world’s data including national security, criminal investigations, medical secrets, intellectual property, and a host of other important rights and responsibilities is governed by a paradigm that is conducted in the Internet ‘cloud’. Based on empirical research and an analysis of international and national legal regimes, case decisions, and forensic case analysis, this paper explores the challenges of reaching into the cloud and the proactive measures that will be necessary to improve legal certainty in the global electronic marketplace. The paper then considers the international and national frameworks necessary for control over the predators in the cloud, and the nature and type of evidentiary and jurisdictional issues that may arise in courts of law and tribunals around the globe.

Published In

Volume 13, Issue 3

Written By

Virginia Greiman

Public/Private Partnerships in Cyberspace: Building a Sustainable Collaboration

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the legal rights and interests of government, private industry, and individual users in cyberspace. However, relatively little has been written about how codes of conduct, public/private partnerships, and standards and collaborative efforts can be used to structure advancement in technological knowledge for the benefit of all users, or how these efforts could better prioritize the rights and responsibilities of each of the actors in cyberspace. Based on empirical research, this paper presents a conceptual framework for building sustainable partnerships between government and private industry, and looks to models of successful partnerships both nationally and internationally.

Published In

Volume 14, Issue 3

Written By

Virginia Greiman

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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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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