Cybercrime and security

Information and communications technology (ICT) are increasingly dominant in industry, trade, government and everyday life.

Crime and terrorism, too, have been taking to cyberspace and the trend will certainly continue. This page sets out how the Crime Frameworks, particularly the Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity and evolutionary approaches such as Co-Eco-Devo-Evo, can help the security side to keep up.

On another page, the more general coverage on technology, crime and security and their co-evolution is also relevant.

ICT can evolve faster than material technologies, and rapidly scale up into pervasive use. Therefore, the scope for cyber-criminals to exploit it and gain a lead in the arms race with the security side is enormous.

It is thus especially important for Crime Science to get a grip on cyberspace and cybercrime.

In the cyber domain, where everything works via software code, clarity of terms and concepts and their logical relationships is vital to support computability. Ontology is thus especially important. An exploration of how conventional Crime Science terms and concepts translate to cyberspace is in Ife et al. (2019).

However, as noted on this page, there are serious weaknesses in the clarity, consistency and completeness of the conventional Crime Science frameworks, whether applied to material crime or cybercrime. Similar issues relate to the security field. But there is no reason why the Crime Frameworks on this website could not be brought in and adapted as appropriate to help to develop a suitable ontology for cybercrime.

The Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity Framework in cyberspace

Although the CCO Framework largely predates the emergence of cybercrime, it’s fairly straightforward to map the CCO elements onto cyber equivalents.

A cyber-crime application of the CCO Framework, from the UK government Foresight project on Cybertrust and Crime Prevention is here (search ‘Ekblom’ for Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity references).

  • The target of crime could be ICT hardware, software, data or networks
  • An enclosure could be defined e.g. by a firewall
  • A wider environment could be a network or a financial management system
  • Offenders could be physically present sitting in front of an unsecured terminal or damaging cabling, or telepresent via the internet
  • Intelligent software agents could be preventers, responders, promoters or even offenders

An experimental serious games approach to training in the use of the CCO Framework to generate plausible interventions against cybercrime (in the form of phishing attacks) is described here.

The Co-Eco-Devo-Evo Framework

The Co-Eco-Devo-Evo Framework draws on the CCO and other Crime Frameworks, and distinguishes three timescales on which reciprocal moves and countermoves can occur between criminals and security. While relevant to all crime, Co-Eco-Devo-Evo was particularly designed to handle the rapid resource acquisition and evolution characteristic of cybercrime and cybersecurity; and to work towards an appropriate ontology.