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Cybercrime: interdisciplinary approaches to cutting crime and victimisation in cyber space

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Edited by

Shujun Li, Professor of Cyber Security, School of Computing, University of Kent, UK â€“ Lead Guest Editor
Michael Levi, Professor of Criminology, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK – Guest Co-Editor
David Maimon, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, USA – Guest Co-Editor
Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Cloud Technology Endowed Associate Professor, Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA – Guest Co-Editor
Gianluca Stringhini, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), Department of Computer Science & Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London (UCL), UK – Guest Co-Editor

‘Cybercrime’ has developed from the old narrower concepts of computer crime and e-crime into a much broader concept covering many different forms of criminal activity in cyber space. Although some law enforcement agencies use ‘cyber-dependent crime’ and ‘cyber-enabled crime’ to classify cybercrime, the boundary between cybercrime and traditional forms of crime has never been clear cut and is becoming increasingly blurred due to the level of hyper-connectivity in today’s highly digitized and networked world. The ubiquitous use of the Internet and smart mobile devices in people’s everyday lives, the wide adoption of cloud based services by industry and government, and, for example, the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Everything (IoE), and the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), lead to the widely accepted belief that almost all criminal activities have some cyber elements. As a consequence, digital forensics (or cyber forensics) have become an essential part of almost all crime investigation processes of law enforcement around the world.

In the last two decades or so, a lot of research has been done on cybercrime. However, there is a clear fragmentation problem: researchers in different disciplines (e.g. criminology and computer science) tend to publish their work in their own fields and do not write for a wider audience. This has been changing recently due to the creation of some interdisciplinary outlets such as the Crime Science Journal, but it is still rare to see research papers on cybercrime that target a truly interdisciplinary audience with both researchers and practitioners in mind. Crime science focuses on improving the detection, prevention and understanding of crime and disorder.

This special issue is one of the first attempts to bring together cybercrime researchers from different fields by encouraging them to publish papers on cutting cybercrime that can benefit researchers and practitioners from a wider spectrum including crime science and computer science.

  1. Spam has been increasingly used for malware distribution. This paper analyzed modern spam from an age-comparative perspective to (i) discover the extent to which psychological weapons of influence and life dom...

    Authors: Daniela Seabra Oliveira, Tian Lin, Harold Rocha, Donovan Ellis, Sandeep Dommaraju, Huizi Yang, Devon Weir, Sebastian Marin and Natalie C. Ebner
    Citation: Crime Science 2019 8:3
  2. This research investigated the association between Internet searches and property crime levels in the United States. States with the highest levels of property crime tended to have the highest levels of Google...

    Authors: Megan S. Stubbs-Richardson, Austin K. Cosby, Karissa D. Bergene and Arthur G. Cosby
    Citation: Crime Science 2018 7:21
  3. The world has seen a dramatic increase in cybercrime, in both the Surface Web, which is the portion of content on the World Wide Web that may be indexed by popular engines, and lately in the Dark Web, a portio...

    Authors: Dario Adriano Bermudez Villalva, Jeremiah Onaolapo, Gianluca Stringhini and Mirco Musolesi
    Citation: Crime Science 2018 7:17
  4. In the computer science field coordinated vulnerability disclosure is a well-known practice for finding flaws in IT-systems and patching them. In this practice, a white-hat hacker who finds a vulnerability in ...

    Authors: Marleen Weulen Kranenbarg, Thomas J. Holt and Jeroen van der Ham
    Citation: Crime Science 2018 7:16