Many of the fears associated with cyber crimes which have become an integral part of our daily lives are in fact culturally construed, David Wall, a professor of criminology at Durham University in England, said in a lecture Thursday.
Wall identified three types of cyber crimes in his lecture. There are crimes against the machine, or hacks, which constitute integrity-related cyber crime. These include breaking into computer systems, denying service to the owner and modifying data.
There are also crimes using the machine or computer-assisted crimes which are deceptions and frauds that may involve networks accepting a user name and password. The last are crimes in the machine, or content-related cyber crime, such as obscenity and violent or abusive speech, he said.
Wall predicted that opportunities for cyber crimes will only increase as the Internet expands. There will be new hacks and frauds, and social networking will become a means for offenders to engage with victims. Hackers will also become stealthier in their work, Wall said.
"It is an art, in some ways," Wall said. "[Hackers are] very sophisticated, and also sophisticated in their understanding of human nature."
In his lecture, Wall emphasized the difference between rhetoric and reality. Despite the rise in Internet crimes in recent years, Wall argued that crime remains a small part of the Internet and that the Internet does not necessarily breed crime.
Most people maintain their moral values while using the Internet, Wall said, offering the increase of online banking as an example. The growing reliance and trust in the Internet, however, has simultaneously increased its value to users and the potential benefits that can accrue to hackers.
Wall said the media is often responsible for fueling myths of the proliferation of cyber crime and its effect on society. For example, press releases from security companies announcing threats picked up by their software may be misinterpreted by journalists as crimes and dramatized into a crime wave, when in fact very few people have been affected, Wall said.
Cultural elements also have an effect on a society's perceptions and misperceptions of cyber crime, Wall said, tracing them back to themes in literature from 18th century novels, savants hacking time and space in Victorian literature, dystopia in post-Vietnam War science fiction and the contemporary culture of fear and anticipation of crimes before they actually occur.
These themes result in distorted perceptions of cyber crime generated by ambiguous concepts of hacker worlds and fictional hacker narratives, Wall said. Such rhetoric leads to a lower level of public knowledge about online risks, lower offender profiles and more vague definitions of cyber crimes.
But increased fear raises public expectations of how the government and police should act in response to crimes, Wall said.
Wall also discussed the scope of criminal opportunity and various aspects of cyber crimes, including personal security, corporate and organizational security, and national and international security. Each group has different stakeholders, and their security concerns requires different responses, Wall said.
Meanwhile, governance over the Internet has also grown, Wall said. Individual Internet users bring moral values and often take up common cause to protect themselves, he said.
Virtual interactive environments such as eBay also establish regulations to manage user interfaces, Wall said. There are corporate organizations, which maintain teams to handle their private security issues, as well as independent organizations that are funded by Internet service providers to challenge government interference, he said. Governments also have dedicated units and public police forces that maintain security online.
Wall said that his interest in cyber crime was sparked by the increase in online fraud and pornography in Britain in the mid-1990s.
"I have this rather strange theory that if it was not for pornography, we wouldn't have interest in the media and the Internet would not have developed," Wall said.
The rise of pornography created a general furor over how pornography could be policed on the Internet, Wall said.
"This raises a range of intellectual questions," Wall said. "And in the U.S., there is also this dichotomy between the freedom of expression and the moral issues related to pornography."
Although Wall now focuses primarily on policing and how to control online crimes, he said that it is crucial to understand the crimes in order to stop them.
"One of the things that I am fascinated by is how we construct our ideas of the crimes in the absence of information," Wall said.
In most cases, police have no sense of who is behind the crime and where it originates, Wall said. This results in incorrect assumptions of identity and jumping to conclusions about hackers' identities. While it is often hard to find the information, this difficulty clouds the judgment of those trying to enforce the law, he said.
