Types Of Cybercrime

Cybercrime, broadly defined as unlawful behaviour involving the use of computers – either as a tool for committing a crime (such as cyber stalking) or as the target of a crime (such as identity theft) – comes in a number of shapes and disguises and this “reasonably short” (i.e. quite long) PowerPoint Presentation can be used to introduce some of the main types.

These include, in no particular order:

Hacking

Viruses

DDoS Attacks

Phishing

Spamming

Jacking

Cyber Stalking

Identity Theft

Slicing

IP Theft

As you may have noticed these types all involve, to greater or lesser extents, access to a networked system of computers – hence the idea of cybercrime: “crime that takes place in cyberspace”: pretty much a defining feature of contemporary computer crime.

The Presentation introduces students to some different varieties of cybercrimes by:

identifying and briefly describing key types.

The list is indicative rather than exhaustive and you’ll find there’s a lot of overlap between the entries. It’s probably best to think of them as overlapping categories (“hacking”, for example, may involve the distribution of a virus or malware whose objective is identity theft) rather than discrete types.

saying a bit about their criminal (or otherwise) objectives.

The obvious reason for this is to reinforce the idea that there’s nothing particularly special or different about cybercrimes: they generally (but not always) have an underlying economic motive involving the same or very similar common-or-garden motives underlying “real world” crimes such as theft, fraud or harassment. The main difference, of course, is that the crime is carried-out using a computer.

rounding things off with an estimate of the global cost to individuals and corporations.

This is very much just a “ballpark figure” to suggest the potential economic costs of different types of cybercrimes. It’s difficult to reliably calculate global costs, partly because losses may be hidden – individuals don’t know they have been victimised, corporations don’t advertise their victimisation – partly because different countries have different ways of calculating and reporting costs and partly because of the aforementioned overlap between different types of cybercrime.

Finally, I haven’t included any specific examples of each type of cybercrime for one of two reasons (please delete as inapplicable):

1. The Presentation is designed for use as a discussion-prompt or as the basis for further exploration. This means you can include your own examples of each type as and how you want.

2. Putting the Presentation together took a lot longer than I’d intended and I got bored didn’t get around to including examples (although this is something I might decide to do as part of any future update).