Epistemologies of Cyberspace: Notes for Interdisciplinary Research

When do businesses report cybercrime? Findings from a UK study

“…This figure is similar to those found in previous research (Rantala, 2008; Wanamaker, 2019) and could be indicative of private entities preferring a private model of crime control regarding cybercrime. In this sense, low levels of business reporting to public authorities may be the result of a lack of confidence in the capacity of public authorities to provide a suitable response, perceptions that attacks can straightforwardly be dealt with ‘internally’, concerns about potential reputational damage by ‘going public’, or not wishing to share Internet or business activity history with public authorities (Caneppele and Aebi, 2017; Lavorgna, 2020). Indeed, the disparity between reporting to public authorities and reporting to anyone outside the organisation exemplifies the rise of private policing that has been documented with regard to cybercrime (Button, 2020).…”

“…With regard to cybercrime reporting, it has been stated that reporting rates may be lower than for traditional crime (van de Weijer et al, 2019;Yar and Steinmetz, 2019). This could be due to a number of factors, such as (a) lack of awareness of victimisation or that the act constitutes a crime, (b) relatively low losses on an individual level may make reporting seem overly costly, (c) lack of confidence in the police's ability to adequately respond to cybercrime, (d) concerns about embarrassment or reputational damage (Lagazio et al, 2014;Lavorgna, 2020), or (e) a realisation that informal resolutions through extra-legal/informal channels might be more productive (e.g. due to cost, privacy, competition, commercial sensitivities).…”

“…Yet, despite the widespread recognition that cybercrime is a salient issue for businesses of all sizes, criminological research on the topic is relatively scarce, which has been attributed to a lack of reliable data (Buil-Gil et al, 2021; Williams et al, 2019). In this regard, one particular problem may be that reporting of crime victimisation by businesses is particularly low (Caneppele and Aebi, 2017; Lavorgna, 2020), which means the dark figure hidden from official statistics hinders research on the topic. This is concerning as, in addition to aiding academic research, reporting is key to the design of effective prevention and response strategies to cybercrime and fraud threats (Kemp et al, 2020; Reep-van den Bergh and Junger, 2018; van de Weijer et al, 2019).…”

Evaluating Research and Scholarly Impact in Criminology and Criminal Justice in the United Kingdom and Italy: A Comparative Perspective

“…Furthermore, the issue of interdisciplinarity remains an elephant in the room, particularly for disciplines such as CCJ that have an inherent interstitial nature (Zedner, 2007) and are increasingly open to collaborations with non-neighboring disciplines in the attempt to make better sense of a complex social reality and technological changes. An example is the importance and the challenges linked to the increasingly common collaborations between criminology and computer and data science when researching the digital field—see Lavorgna, 2021).…”

The Future of Interdisciplinary Research in the Digital Era: Obstacles and Perspectives of Collaboration in Social and Data Sciences - An Empirical Study

“…The continued digitization of society required a research approach with interdisciplinary foundations capable of integrating social sciences and information technology knowledge (Loader & Dutton, 2012). We can find examples of computer science and social sciences working together from ethnographic field study (Goulden et al, 2016) through cyber criminology (Lavorgna, 2021) to research on cybersecurity (Jacob et al, 2019). Computational Social Science and Social Computing came to scene as adequate fields of blending the knowledge of computer and social sciences.…”