Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

THE SIZE OF THE CHALLENGE
The population of cyberspace is estimated by the UK government to be 
>
2 billion. 
While we do not accurately know the frequency or longevity, this means that one-
third of Earth’s population visit cyberspace and billions more are anticipated to 
join them over the next decade, exchanging over $8 trillion in online commerce. 

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6
CHAPTER 1
Cyberspace: The new frontier for policing?
According to the Commissioner of the City of London Police, “cyber” fraud (broadly 
offences of dishonesty committed by use of computer networks) costs the UK 
£
27 
billion per year while “cyber breaches” (presumably involving the unauthorized in-
filtration of a private or public computer network) have been recorded by 93% of 
small and medium businesses in the United Kingdom in 2013, an increase of 87% 
on the previous year.
Aside from some of the peculiar criminological features unique to crime com-
mitted in cyberspace (such as the absence of any real motive for anyone—individual 
or corporate victims or their Internet Service Providers—to report crimes involving 
fraud) the basic challenge facing us now seems to be how to get to grips with the 
concept of cyberspace—vibrant, resilient, secure or otherwise. Having separated cy-
bercrime from cyber-enabled crime in the same way we might separate crime within 
a transport network from crime where the transport network is merely an enabler, 
surely we need to begin to treat cyberspace for what it is: a separate socio-spatial 
dimension in which people choose not only to communicate, but also to dwell, trade, 
socialize and cultivate; to create intellectual property, generate economic wealth, to 
begin and end relationships; to forage, feud and thrive; to heal and harm. Viewed in 
this way cyberspace is another continent, vast, viable and virtual, a distinct jurisdic-
tion requiring its own constitution and legal system, its own law enforcement agents 
and practices. The Director of Operational Policing Support for Interpol’s General 
Secretariat, Michael O’Connell, has compared the movement across cyberspace with 
“the 2 billion passenger movements across the world.” The reality is that cyber trav-
elers move around the borderless virtual globe with almost immeasurable speed, 
almost zero cost and almost total anonymity.
The challenge of tackling cyber security stretches way beyond simply standard-
izing our legal frameworks. The UK Government has also recognized that “Without 
effective cyber security, we place our ability to do business and to protect valuable 
assets such as our intellectual property at unacceptable risk.” In the report com-
missioned by the UK Government, Price Waterhouse Coopers estimate that there 
are over 1000 different global publications setting out cyber standards. Moreover, 
their assessment of the standards situation across organizations looked patchy and 
incomplete.
While the awareness of cyber security threats and the importance placed on 
them was generally found to be high, the efforts to mitigate cyber security risk dif-
fer significantly with the size of the organization and its sector. The report found 
that only 48% of organizations implemented new policies to mitigate cyber se-
curity risks and only 43% conducted cyber security risk assessments and impact 
analysis to quantify these risks. The report also found that 34% of organizations 
who purchased certified products or services did so purely to achieve compliance 
as an outcome.
Although the authors are clear in pointing out that the online survey reached 
an audience of ~30,000 organizations, it produced around 500 responses, not all of 
them complete. Nevertheless, the picture that emerges from the report is one of a 
fragmented and nonstandardized response to a global threat.

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