Cybercrime and You: How Criminals Attack and the Human Factors That They Seek to Exploit

Abstract

Cybercrime is a significant challenge to society, but it can be particularly harmful to the individuals who become victims. This chapter engages in a comprehensive and topical analysis of the cybercrimes that target individuals. It also examines the motivation of criminals that perpetrate such attacks and the key human factors and psychological aspects that help to make cybercriminals successful. Key areas assessed include social engineering (e.g., phishing, romance scams, catfishing), online harassment (e.g., cyberbullying, trolling, revenge porn, hate crimes), identity-related crimes (e.g., identity theft, doxing), hacking (e.g., malware, cryptojacking, account hacking), and denial-of-service crimes. As a part of its contribution, the chapter introduces a summary taxonomy of cybercrimes against individuals and a case for why they will continue to occur if concerted interdisciplinary efforts are not pursued.

Developing cybersecurity education and awareness programmes for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

“…We will also include cybersecurity training on the areas of cyber-risk identified from the SME's assessments; this would increase applicability and potentially effectiveness [49,25]. In the interest of keeping updated, there could also be activities pertaining to current cybercrimes and the factors that criminals seek to exploit [38]. Any risks discovered through assessments or based on current attacks could be addressed through the development of plans with a special emphasis on cybersecurity education, awareness and training (e.g., support via internal programme and third-party resources and services) and for the SME's specific mission, user and organisational context.…”

The social and psychological impact of cyberattacks

“…This factor affects our discussions on impacts as the consequence of some online actions or activities may not be fully tangible to people in the offline world. This has also been discussed in other areas as it relates to cybercrime (Nurse, 2018).…”

“…In January 2017, the Lloyds Banking Group and other banks in the UK fell victim to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that persisted over a two-day period. DoS describes an attack where systems are bombarded with illegitimate data or requests, and therefore become unable to respond to legitimate requests (e.g., for a webpage or service access) in a timely manner (Nurse, 2018). In this instance, the financial institutions were attacked by a distributed DoS (DDoS) in which the illegitimate requests originated from multiple, dynamically changing locations.…”

“…Cyberattacks are defined here as events which aim to compromise the integrity, confidentiality or availability of a system (technical or socio-technical). These attacks range from hacking and denial-of-services (DoS), to ransomware and spyware infections, and can affect everyone from the public to the critical national infrastructure of a country (Nurse, 2018). In this article, we will examine this topic of cyber-attacks from more of a social To be published in: Benson & McAlaney (2019/20) Emerging Cyber Threats and Cognitive Vulnerabilities, Academic Press and behavioral science perspective, with the aim of exploring the social and psychological factors and impacts associated with these attacks.…”

The Group Element of Cybercrime: Types, Dynamics, and Criminal Operations

“…In cases of mistrust, members of groups can be doxxed, such as the true identities of the members of the LulzSec gang that were made public, which ultimately led to the FBI arresting LulzSec leader Hector "Sabu" Monsegur [2]. The interested reader is referred to the previous chapter for further information on doxxing and other common cybercrimes [64]. The Darkode forum, which had between 250-300 members, is another interesting case that operated very carefully and was very exclusive.…”