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Cybercrime 4.0: Now What Is to Be Done?

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What is to Be Done About Crime and Punishment?

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Abstract

There has been widespread agreement about the scale of the cybercrime problem—that it represents one of the most serious of all contemporary criminal threats (Cabinet Office 2011; Cowley 2012). From the mid-1990s onwards this conclusion has driven significant shifts in legislation, policing powers and policy across most national jurisdictions. But how effective have these been? Perhaps more significantly, do these responses offer any kind of template for dealing with future developments in the cybercrime threat? In this chapter I review the health of our defences against online offending in the light of what may be its latest mutation, an emerging complex of technical opportunity which, for convenience, will be termed Cybercrime 4.0. I ask if what worked in previous contexts is likely to continue to work, or if this latest shift represents another permutation of the old maxim that crime control is always one step behind the (cyber)criminal.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Computer viruses offer one example, piracy and illicit copying provide another.

  2. 2.

    This suggests that computing power roughly doubles every two years.

  3. 3.

    ‘Whitelisting’ of favoured sites, or creating a ‘sinkhole’ which diverts malicious traffic to a spoof site where it can be analysed (Bruneau 2010) offer other examples.

  4. 4.

    If other costs, such as cleaning up an infection are incorporated, Anderson et al. estimate this figure could rise to over $25,000 m globally—around $1200 m for the UK.

  5. 5.

    In Louisiana LA. REV. STAT. ANN. § 14:90.3 (West 1997).

  6. 6.

    18 U.S.C. 1030. Both have been subject to ongoing revision and amendment—for example via other legislation such as the Police and Justice Act 2006.

  7. 7.

    These occur where there is no attempt to decrypt but simply to check through every permutation or candidate for a code or password.

  8. 8.

    Based on an analysis of over 1300 data-breach incidents investigated by Verizon.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK

    Michael R. McGuire

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  1. Michael R. McGuire
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Roger Matthews

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McGuire, M.R. (2016). Cybercrime 4.0: Now What Is to Be Done?. In: Matthews, R. (eds) What is to Be Done About Crime and Punishment?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57228-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57228-8_10

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57227-1

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