Policing Cyber Crime

The purpose of Policing Cybercrime and Cyberterror is to provide an in-depth discussion of the perceptions and responses of U.S. law enforcement agencies at all levels in dealing with cybercrime and cyberterror. The themes for this book include the challenges that cybercrime and digital evidence handling pose for local and state agencies, the jurisdictional and investigative hurdles that hinder the response capabilities of police agencies, and the complexities of the actual investigation of these offenses and their impact on officers. This text analyzes data collected from local law enforcement agencies in the U.S., in order to understand officer perceptions of and responses to cybercrime and cyberterrorism, along with samples from digital forensic examiners, to understand their stress, satisfaction, secondary trauma, and coping mechanisms in response to work experiences. The findings demonstrate the realities of policing cybercrimes and those involving digital evidence processing relative to traditional offenses. Policing Cybercrime and Cyberterror addresses a gap in the policing literature by examining the various technological and policy changes needed to increase the investigative response of police agencies, along with various internal policies to improve support for forensic investigators. PowerPoint slides are available upon adoption. Sample slides from the full 53-slide presentation are available to view here. Email [email protected] for more information. "Policing Cybercrime and Cyberterror is a must-read for anyone who is interested in cybercrime or pursuing a career in cybercrime investigation. The authors do an excellent job of providing readers with the latest trends in cybercrime research while also presenting new findings in this area. I strongly recommend this book!" -- Robert M. Worley, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Lamar University "...a timely addition to the study of policing and criminal activity on a number of counts. [The book] makes a valuable contribution to the study of policing in general, but in particular in understanding of the operational culture of cybercrime investigators. This is important as increasingly policing includes the monitoring of electronic communications and Internet sources." -- David Lowe, Criminal Justice Review 41(2)

Cybercrime has recently experienced an ascending position in national security agendas world-wide. It has become part of the National Security Strategies of a growing number of countries, becoming a Tier One threat, above organised crime and fraud generally. Furthermore, new techno-social developments in social network media suggest that cyber-threats will continue to increase. This collection addresses the recent 'inertia' in both critical thinking and the empirical study of cybercrime and policing by adding to the literature seven interdisciplinary and critical chapters on various issues relating to the new generation of cybercrimes currently being experienced. The chapters illustrate that cybercrimes are changing in two significant ways that are asymmetrical. On the one hand cybercrime is becoming increasingly professionalised, resulting in ’specialists’ that perform complex and sophisticated attacks on computer systems and human users. On the other, the ‘hyper-connectivity’ brought about by the exponential growth in social media users has opened up opportunities to ‘non-specialist’ citizens to organise and communicate in ways that facilitate crimes on and offline. While largely distinct, these developments pose equally contrasting challenges for policing which this book addresses. This book was originally published as a special issue of Policing and Society.

By its very nature digital crime may present a number of specific detection and investigative challenges. The use of steganography to hide child abuse images for example, can pose the kind of technical and legislative problems inconceivable just two decades ago. The volatile nature of much digital evidence can also pose problems, particularly in terms of the actions of the 'first officer on the scene'. There are also concerns over the depth of understanding that 'generic' police investigators may have concerning the possible value (or even existence) of digitally based evidence. Furthermore, although it is perhaps a cliché to claim that digital crime (and cybercrime in particular) respects no national boundaries, it is certainly the case that a significant proportion of investigations are likely to involve multinational cooperation, with all the complexities that follow from this. This groundbreaking volume offers a theoretical perspective on the policing of digital crime in the western world. Using numerous case-study examples to illustrate the theoretical material introduced this volume examine the organisational context for policing digital crime as well as crime prevention and detection. This work is a must-read for all academics, police practitioners and investigators working in the field of digital crime.

What are cyber threats? This book brings together a diverse range of multidisciplinary ideas to explore the extent of cyber threats, cyber hate and cyber terrorism. This ground-breaking text provides a comprehensive understanding of the range of activities that can be defined as cyber threats. It also shows how this activity forms in our communities and what can be done to try to prevent individuals from becoming cyber terrorists. This text will be of interest to academics, professionals and practitioners involved in building social capital; engaging with hard to reach individuals and communities; the police and criminal justice sector as well as IT professionals.

"National security increasingly depends on computer security. Cybercrime is written by the leading academic experts and government officials who team together to present a state-of-the-art vision for how to detect and prevent digital crime, creating the blueprint for how to police the dangerous back alleys of the global Internet."--Peter P. Swire, C. William O'Neill Professor of Law, the Ohio State University, and former Chief Counselor for Privacy, U.S. Office of Management & Budget.The Internet has dramatically altered the landscape of crime and national security, creating new threats, such as identity theft, computer viruses, and cyberattacks. Moreover, because cybercrimes are not often limited to a single site or national border, crime scenes themselves have changed. Consequently, law enforcement itself must confront these new dangers and embrace novel methods of prevention, as well as produce new tools for digital surveillance - which can jeopardize privacy and civil liberties.Cybercrime brings together leading experts in law, criminal justice, and security studies to describe crime prevention and security protection in the electronic age. Ranging from new government requirements that facilitate spying to new methods of digital proof, the book is essential to understand how criminal law-and even crime itself-have been transformed in our networked world.

This groundbreaking text examines for the first time the nature and consequences of crime on the internet; analyzing the new challenges that cybercrimes pose to the criminal justice system.

The emergence of the World Wide Web, smartphones, and computers has transformed the world and enabled individuals to engage in crimes in a multitude of new ways. Criminological scholarship on these issues has increased dramatically over the last decade, as have studies on ways to prevent and police these offenses. This book is one of the first texts to provide a comprehensive review of research regarding cybercrime, policing and enforcing these offenses, and the prevention of various offenses as global change and technology adoption increases the risk of victimization around the world. Drawing on a wide range of literature, Holt and Bossler offer an extensive synthesis of numerous contemporary topics such as theories used to account for cybercrime, policing in domestic and transnational contexts, cybercrime victimization and issues in cybercrime prevention. The findings provide a roadmap for future research in cybercrime, policing, and technology, and discuss key controversies in the existing research literature in a way that is otherwise absent from textbooks and general cybercrime readers. This book is an invaluable resource for academics, practitioners, and students interested in understanding the state of the art in social science research. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students interested in cybercrime, cyber-deviance, victimization, policing, criminological theory, and technology in general.