Every day, you hear about cybercrime. More and more, it is presented as a problem to society: hacking, fraud, obscene behaviour, hate speech, fake news, pornography, and stalking. But what makes these crimes cybercrimes, and how are they investigated and treated differently in a court of law?
Cyberspace: where it all started
A simplistic explanation of cybercrime is that of a crime that takes place in cyberspace. So, what is cyberspace?
The origins of cyberspace can be traced back to cyberpunk literature from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cyberpunk authors created dystopian ideas about how IT could disrupt the social order.
Cyberpunk characters were indeed often marginalized and alienated loners who inhabited a technology-dominated future.
Cyberspace is the imaginary realm created by a social, psychological, and cultural reaction to the scientific fusion of digital and networked technologies.
The cultural representation of cyberspace in films and fictional literature helped establish the concept of an imaginary space that people could inhabit and navigate.
The term ‘cyberspace’ first appeared in 1982 in a short story titled “Burning Chrome,” authored by Canadian-American writer William Gibson. The story follows the adventures of the hacker group Cyberspace Seven.
Is cyberspace real?
Gibson’s vision of cyberspace is similar to that of the movie The Matrix, in which individuals leave their physical bodies behind and shift their consciousness from the physical world to cyberspace.
However, other authors depicted cyberspace as a place that is neither inside a computer nor a network but in the imagination of networked individuals, where digital and physical are meshed.
However imaginary, cyberspace is becoming a contended space, gaining more and more economic and intellectual power. At the same time, it has no legal definition and crimes committed in cyberspace are treated by the law the same way as street crimes.
What we know about cybercrime
- Cybercrime is a crime that happens in cyberspace
- Cybercrime is an invention of the media. Crime made Gibson's narrative more compelling.
- Gibson and other authors continued the cyberspace crime theme in their following fiction works.
- Cybercrime was depicted as harmful activities conducted in virtual environments.
- The term hacker was born to describe those who illicitly explored forbidden spaces.
- The term hacker was adopted for cyberspace too.
Cybercrime is actual today, and hacking is a career for many. So, how did we get from fiction to reality?
What is cybercrime?
In essence, cybercrime is the intersection of criminal activity and the digital world, posing significant threats to individuals, businesses, and governments.
However, despite abundant available data, there isn’t an internationally agreed-upon definition of cybercrime.
- This is because defining cybercrime requires a criminological, socio-legal, sociological, social policy, computer science, software engineering, information management, and economic and technological understanding of what has happened.
Statistics on cybercrime
The cybersecurity industry regularly produces statistics on cybercrime. And so do Governments through the data they collect from their cybercrime and fraud reporting centres.
- However, cybercrime is under-reported and self-reported, making these reports as valid as the experience of the person reporting it.
Developing a cyber-criminology body of knowledge with these shaky premises isn’t easy.
Cyber-criminal profiling
Based on the available sources, cyber-offender profiles have been developed to help authorities catch cybercriminals. These profiles don’t dramatically differ from common criminals’ ones—most offenders are white and male. However, they often possess characteristics that oppose those found in street criminals.
- This is why studying online behaviour in combination with relevant criminology theories has become a key to improving the understanding of cybercrime.