In the 2020s it’s increasingly difficult to imagine a criminal or deviant behaviour that does not involve an online component – especially in the world’s most digitally-advanced societies. Cybercrime can be anything from online ‘phishing’ scams and intellectual property theft to denial-of-service and ransomware attacks, right up to cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare. It has described by Warren Buffett as the "number one problem with mankind” and a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear weapons.
Nonetheless, cybercrime is often still regarded as a specialist area of expertise – with its own jargon and its own mythology – bringing together very different types of illegal behaviours characterised by having an online component. This means cybercrime struggles to find its own ‘home’, both in the academic context of traditionally distinct disciplines, and in the practical context of, for instance, conventional and locally-bound law enforcement units.
In writing a textbook on cybercrimes it’s therefore important not only to try and offer a clear image of moving targets, but also to try to unhinge some of the frames that might be limiting our ability to study and address these cybercrimes.
Cybercrime has wide-reaching effects on businesses, governments and society that go beyond the traditional boundaries of criminology. This is because the internet has become a ubiquitous and integral part of everyday life. On a daily basis we use software to make phone calls, use social media to connect to friends or even strangers, and use apps to buy all kinds of products.
E-commerce is central to many businesses - and became even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses of all sizes are vulnerable to cyber attack. But so are governments and individuals. In the UK, government IT systems from the National Health Service to the Post Office have been targeted.
The effects of cybercrime can be devastating. They may include lost revenue, service disruption, reputational damage, intellectual property theft - even financial ruin. The global cost of cybercrime was estimated at over $6 trillion in 2021. If that were the GDP of a country, it would be the world’s third largest economy, after the USA and China. And it’s getting worse. The cost of cybercrime is set to surpass $11 trillion in 2023, and reach $20 trillion by 2026. That’s an increase of almost 150% from 2022.
The first issue to address in the study of cybercrime is that, despite the prevalence and potentially devastating effects of cybercrime, it’s still largely perceived as somehow disconnected from mainstream criminology, policing and, more generally, from ‘real’ (read: offline) society.
This viewpoint, however, seems increasingly anachronistic to say the least. One common myth fuelling this view is that, for a crime to be or to become ‘cyber’, high-tech skills are required. In reality, many forms of cybercrimes are relatively low-tech. According to certain media-led depictions of crime in cyberspace, all cyber-offenders are code wizards, able to do magic on all types of tech devices. The problem is that this view ends up discouraging less tech-savvy students, researchers and even law enforcement officers from engaging with so-called cybercrimes, as if they were a separate category of behaviours that we can toss aside, pigeonholing them in a small box of our studies or investigations.
A second issue involves having an education system that’s usually based on disciplinary boundaries, when dealing with a topic that requires a transdisciplinary approach.
Professionals of the future will have to work from different angles to promote and preserve security in cyberspace. Both technical and critical thinking skills are required to deal with the challenges of crime and deviance in cyberspace. On the one hand, it’s important to understand how things (might) occur; but on the other, we need to be able to embed these new challenges in the context of the big themes in the social and legal sciences. This is essential to the preservation of both our individual rights and the public good in the digital age. Think, for instance, of the debates on the shifting balance between privacy and security in cyberspace.
This is why attention is increasingly turning towards transdisciplinary approaches, not only by drawing on intellectual and methodological insights from different disciplines, but also by allowing them to transcend their traditional disciplinary boundaries and integrate their epistemologies.
Of course, transdisciplinary approaches are complex, as they require different disciplines and professions to make a serious effort in understanding each other’s language, theoretical and methodological frameworks, and standards – which may vary considerably. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach, however, doesn’t mean that everyone needs to do and understand everything with the same level of detail. It would be unfeasible to pretend so. However, it means that people with different backgrounds can have a common understanding and learn how to speak a common language. This is something that can enable them to work side by side, with their different bodies of expertise, towards a common good.
A third, big issue is the ‘glocal’ element of cybercrimes: they can occur in specific, local contexts but potentially have a global impact.
Without forgetting the need to have in-depth knowledge of the jurisdiction you’re working in, it’s important for students and practitioners alike to have some understanding of ‘how things work’ beyond their catchment area, to learn about best practices but also about problematic or culture-specific aspects and effects of cybercrimes. Once more, the way forward for addressing cybercrimes necessitates bringing in new perspectives that cut across existing boundaries.
In the end, it’s not surprising that multidimensional, often transnational and at times complex phenomena need cooperation – of minds, of disciplines and of countries – to be prevented and mitigated. But this approach enables us to think proactively about the trade-offs we’re willing to accept as a society between privacy, security and convenience in addressing crime and deviancy in cyberspace.
Anita Lavorgna is author of Cybercrimes: Critical Issues in a Global Context and Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy, where she teaches on sociology, social change, and cybercrime. Her research pivots around cybercrimes and digital social harms, and is mostly based on interdisciplinary approaches.
