BotNet News

Cybercrime is an area of concern for many governments and societies around the world. It is becoming increasingly commonplace and the nature of these crimes means they can affect almost any organisation or individual, regardless of their size or industry sector. Various definitions, typologies and taxonomies have been developed to try to understand these offences and cyberdeviant acts, but it is difficult to find a clear and precise classification framework.

New technologies create new opportunities for criminal behaviour but there are few entirely novel illegal activities that can only be committed online. Criminals do not need a computer to commit fraud, traffic in child pornography and intellectual property or steal identity or violate privacy; these crimes existed before the “cyber” prefix was added to them.

Instead, the most common way that people become victims of cyber crime is by opening attachments to spam emails from senders they do not know or clicking on links in unfamiliar websites. Criminals also use phishing campaigns to trick recipients into disclosing their personal information. Another common method of attack is by using software to gain a foothold on systems and collect data, for example by key logging which can capture passwords and bank account details.

Several academics have proposed different taxonomies of cybercrimes in an attempt to distinguish them from traditional offences. Wall’s [20] early taxonomy and the COE’s Convention of Cybercrime Taxonomy [25] are both commonly cited in academic literature. The taxonomy used by Tsakalidis and Vergidis [15] largely mirrors the COE’s convention, but differs in that it includes ‘Illegal data acquisition’ as a separate category while ‘Trademark-related offences’, ‘Racism and hate speech on the internet’ and ‘Identity theft’ are subsumed into the type A (or ‘Category 1’) offences.