CybercrimeTo Tackle Cybercrime We First Need to Understand It

As shopping surged over Christmas and now into the January sales, it has been one of the busiest times of the year online. Yes, Santa, the high street, and Amazon have all been doing overtime … and so, each year, does cybercrime. (You may, indeed, have caught the recent credit card hack over at Macy’s.)

So what can we do about cybercrime? To answer that, you need to understand it. Enter Dr. Jonathan Lusthaus, Director of The Human Cybercriminal Project in the Department of Sociology, at the University of Oxford. Dr. Lusthaus has spent the last seven years researching the hidden details of cybercrime. His book on the subject, Industry of Anonymity, is published by Harvard University Press. He’s also written on the subject for range of periodicals including the New York Times and the New Statesman, and been interviewed by the Financial Times’s Tech Tonic podcast and the a16z podcast..

Oxford saysthat in those years of research, he interviewed almost 250 people. These included law enforcement agents, security professionals and former cybercriminals. Speaking about the people he met, he remarked on how normal this new kind of criminal seems to be: “I was able to interview a number of former cybercriminals from a range of countries. There are a lot of interesting characters out there, but ultimately they are just people like the rest of us. Many of the former offenders I spoke to were intelligent and engaging.”

What drove him to find out so much about this world? Originally, he was planning to research religious violence, but found himself fascinated by cybercrime after a talk on the topic from the journalist Misha Glenny. With the subject becoming a growing obsession, he kept researching, doing his doctorate on the subject under the supervision of Federico Varese, a leading authority on organized crime.