Combating Cybercrime When There’s Plenty of Phish in the Sea

by Sarah Collins,   University of Cambridge

We’ve all received the emails, hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Warnings that our bank account will be closed tomorrow, and we’ve only got to click a link and send credit card information to stop it from happening. ….

Tricking people into handing over sensitive information such as credit card details – known as ‘phishing’ – is one of the ways criminals scam people online. Most of us think we’re smarter than these scams. Most of us think that we could probably con the con artist if we tried. But we would be wrong.

Across the world, cybercrime is booming. When the UK government included cybercrime in the national crime statistics for the first time in 2015, it doubled the crime rate overnight. Millions of people worldwide are victimised by online scams, whether it’s blocking access to a website, stealing personal or credit card information, or attempting to extort money by remotely holding the contents of a personal computer hostage.

It is in this context that computer scientists, criminologists, and legal academics in 2015 combined their expertise to form the Cambridge Cybercrime Center, with the goal of helping governments, businesses, and users to construct better defenses against cyberattacks. The Cambridge Cybercrime Center wants to make it easier for cybercrime researchers from around the world to get access to data and share their results with each other.

To accomplish their goals, the Cambridge Cybercrime Center researchers will leverage their existing relationships to collect and store cybercrime datasets. Other researchers then can get a license from the Center to study the data without the hassle of identifying and approaching the data holders themselves.

“Right now, getting access to data in this area is incredibly complicated,” says Dr Richard Clayton of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, who is also Director of the Centre. “But we think the framework we’ve set up will create a step change in the amount of work in cybercrime that uses real data. More people will be able to do research, and by allowing others to work on the same datasets more people will be able to do reproducible research and compare techniques, which is done extremely rarely at the moment.”

The researchers also are studying issues surrounding what motivates someone to commit cybercrime, and what makes them stop. “Our Cybercrime Center will not only provide detailed technical information about what’s going on, so that firms can construct better defenses,” says University of Cambridge professor Ross Anderson. “It will also provide strategic information, as a basis for making better policy.”  Read the full article.