In the last decade, cybercrime has risen considerably. One key factor is the proliferation of online cybercrime communities, where actors trade products and services, and also learn from each other. Accordingly, understanding the operation and behavior of these communities is of great interest, and they have been explored across multiple disciplines with different, often quite novel, approaches. This survey explores the challenges inherent to the field and the methodological approaches researchers used to understand this space. We note that, in many cases, cybercrime research is more of an art than a science. We highlight the good practices and propose a list of recommendations for future cybercrime community scholars, including taking steps to verify and validate results, establishing privacy and ethical research practices, and mitigating the challenge of ground truth data. more »« less
Payne, Brian; Hadzhidimova, Lora
(, International journal of cyber criminology)
Jaishankar, K.
(Ed.)
Compared to other topics, cybercrime is a relatively new addition to the criminological literature. interest in the topic has grown over the past decade, with a handful of scholars leading efforts to generate empirical understanding about the topic. Common conclusions reached in these studies are that more research is needed, cybercrime is interdisciplinary in nature, and cybercrime should be addressed as an international problem. In this study, we examine a sample of 593 prior cybercrime scholarly articles to identify the types of research strategies used in them, the patterns guiding those strategies, whether the research is interdisciplinary, and the degree to which scholars engage in international cybercrime studies. Attention is also given to co-authorship as well as citation patterns. Implications for future research are provided.
In recent decades, law enforcement agencies have increasingly prioritized cybercrime investigations, as evinced by the growing adoption of specialized cybercrime units and personnel. A burgeoning literature has emerged which examines cybercrime units and investigators. Yet, little attention has been given to the role of computers in shaping these investigations. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of qualitative interviews with 47 cybercrime investigative personnel including sworn detectives, civilian analysts, and unit administrators. This analysis confirms and extends prior research by exploring challenges presented by computers to cybercrime investigations including issues surrounding anonymization, encryption, jurisdiction, caseloads, backlogs, data volume, eliciting data from electronic service providers, and the ever-changing technological landscape. Also considered are the advantages offered by such technologies for cybercrime investigations. Computer and network technologies facilitate undercover investigations, provide easy access to global networks and databases, and supply large quantities of evidence to help secure convictions. Finally, this study considers elements of cybercrime investigations not supplanted by computer databases, automation, or network systems. Directions for future research and policy implications are considered.
Indigenous Peoples have been stewarding lands with fire for ecosystem improvement since time immemorial. These stewardship practices are part and parcel of the ways in which Indigenous Peoples have long recorded and protected knowledge through our cultural transmission practices, such as oral histories. In short, our Peoples have always been data gatherers, and as this article presents, we are also fire data gatherers and stewards. Given the growing interest in fire research with Indigenous communities, there is an opportunity for guidance on data collection conducted equitably and responsibly with Indigenous Peoples. This Special Issue of Fire presents fire research approaches and data harvesting practices with Indigenous communities as we “Reimagine the Future of Living and Working with Fire”. Specifically, the article provides future-thinking practices that can achieve equitable, sustainable, and just outcomes with and for stakeholders and rightholders (the preferred term Indigenous Peoples use in partnerships with academics, agencies, and NGOs). This research takes from the following key documents to propose an “Indigenous fire data sovereignty” (IFDS) framework: (1) Articles declared in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as identified by the author and specified in Indigenous-led and allied Indigenous fire research in Australia, Canada, and the U.S.; (2) recommendations specific to cultural fire policy and calls for research in the 2023 Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission report; (3) research and data barriers and opportunities produced in the 2024 Good Fire II report; and threads from (4) the Indigenous Fire Management conceptual model. This paper brings together recommendations on Indigenous data sovereignty, which are principles developed by Indigenous researchers for the protection, dissemination, and stewardship of data collected from Tribal/Nation/Aboriginal/First Nations Indigenous communities. The proposed IFDS framework also identifies potential challenges to Indigenous fire data sovereignty. By doing so, the framework serves as an apparatus to deploy fire research and data harvesting practices that are culturally informed, responsible, and ethically demonstrated. The article concludes with specific calls to action for academics and researchers, allies, fire managers, policymakers, and Indigenous Peoples to consider in exercising Indigenous fire data sovereignty and applying Indigenous data sovereignty principles to fire research.
Cyberattacks are a major threat in the modern era, yet there is a lack of information on how cybercrime groups think and operate. This paper aims to better understand cyber adversaries by analyzing penetration testing teams during the 2018 and 2019 National Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition, in which groups of students performed similar actions as cybercriminals, attempting to identify and exploit system vulnerabilities. Using penetration testing teams as an ethical proxy for cybercrime groups allows the researchers to study group dynamics as well as factors impacting the rationality of cybercriminals. Themes identified in manually coded interview transcripts are compared to the existing literature on cybercrime groups. Similar to what is established in the prior research, themes emerged in the interviews on the group structure and dynamics of each team, featuring elements of leadership, division of labor, the role of each team member, the presence of partners and subgroups, communication within the team, and interpersonal team member relationships. Other apparent factors that specifically impacted the bounded, or limited, rationality of the team members included setbacks and problem solving, the competition environment, stress, and issues with morale. This comparison of penetration testing groups with cybercrime groups allows for the development of a better understanding of the operations and rational thinking of a criminal organization, which may lead to a better understanding of how to prevent or defend against cyberattacks, such as by improving response times of the security team or by increasing the difficulty of penetrating the technical environment
Klassen, Shamika; Fiesler, Casey
(, Social Media + Society)
While research has been conducted with and in marginalized or vulnerable groups, explicit guidelines and best practices centering on specific communities are nascent. An excellent case study to engage within this aspect of research is Black Twitter. This research project considers the history of research with Black communities, combined with empirical work that explores how people who engage with Black Twitter think about research and researchers in order to suggest potential good practices and what researchers should know when studying Black Twitter or other digital traces from marginalized or vulnerable online communities. From our interviews, we gleaned that Black Twitter users feel differently about their content contributing to a research study depending on, for example, the type of content and the positionality of the researcher. Much of the advice participants shared for researchers involved an encouragement to cultivate cultural competency, get to know the community before researching it, and conduct research transparently. Aiming to improve the experience of research for both Black Twitter and researchers, this project is a stepping stone toward future work that further establishes and expands user perceptions of research ethics for online communities composed of vulnerable populations.
Hughes, Jack, Pastrana, Sergio, Hutchings, Alice, Afroz, Sadia, Samtani, Sagar, Li, Weifeng, and Santana Marin, Ericsson.
"The Art of Cybercrime Community Research". ACM Computing Surveys 56 (6). Country unknown/Code not available: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3639362.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10495736.
@article{osti_10495736,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {The Art of Cybercrime Community Research},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10495736},
DOI = {10.1145/3639362},
abstractNote = {In the last decade, cybercrime has risen considerably. One key factor is the proliferation of online cybercrime communities, where actors trade products and services, and also learn from each other. Accordingly, understanding the operation and behavior of these communities is of great interest, and they have been explored across multiple disciplines with different, often quite novel, approaches. This survey explores the challenges inherent to the field and the methodological approaches researchers used to understand this space. We note that, in many cases, cybercrime research is more of an art than a science. We highlight the good practices and propose a list of recommendations for future cybercrime community scholars, including taking steps to verify and validate results, establishing privacy and ethical research practices, and mitigating the challenge of ground truth data.},
journal = {ACM Computing Surveys},
volume = {56},
number = {6},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Hughes, Jack and Pastrana, Sergio and Hutchings, Alice and Afroz, Sadia and Samtani, Sagar and Li, Weifeng and Santana Marin, Ericsson},
}
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