Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity

This edited collection presents current research dealing with crime involving information and communications technologies in the months immediately before, during and following the coronavirus pandemic since 2019. Information and communications technologies played a pivotal role during the pandemic in communicating information across the globe on the risks and responses to the pandemic but also in providing opportunities for various forms of illegality. This volume describes the nature and extent of such illegality, its connection to the pandemic and how digital technologies can assist in solving not only the health crisis but also the associated crime problems. The contributors are established academic scholars and policy practitioners in the fields of cybercrime and computer forensics. This book provides a ready source of content including technological solutions to cybercrime, legal and legislative responses, crime prevention initiatives and policy discussions dealing with the most critical issues present during and following the pandemic.

The Pivot explores bystander intervention and image-based sexual abuse. It fills a critical gap in the market on a significant and contemporary legal, social, public health, and criminal justice issue. It is timely in light of a number of recent high-profile instances of image-based sexual abuse perpetration, including those involving the non-consensual digital altering and sharing of sexual imagery – sexualised “deepfakes” created with AI, digital tools or software – of celebrities (e.g. Taylor Swift) and young women. This book draws upon the first mixed methods study of its kind globally and makes a substantial contribution to the conceptualisation of image-based sexual abuse and bystander intervention; an issue that has not yet been explored in detail. Drawing on criminology, gender studies, psychology, and law, it provides new theoretical and practical insights of particular relevance to practitioners, stakeholders, and government and non-government organisations on how bystander intervention can be an untapped prevention resource.

This accessible book examines American law enforcement cybercrime investigations. Through semi-structured interviews with forty-seven cybercrime law enforcement investigators, it explores the characteristics of investigators, the development of cybercrime units and task force programs in the US, the processes involved in these investigations, and the culture of American cybercrime investigations. This includes how cybercrime investigators relate to police occupational culture, their perceptions of offenders and victims, and use of humor. It also considers the technological, economic, political, and cultural contexts that shape and structure cybercrime investigations, units, and task forces. It adopts a sociological approach to the study of cybercrime policing by tracing connections between the individual and organizational levels of analysis to the macro-structural. In other words, it situates cybercrime policing in the “big picture” of technological change, the political economic of internet platforms, the transformation of “force” in the internet age, and related matters. Finally, this book builds from this comprehensive analysis of American policing to discuss pathways forward by curating institutional and organizational policy suggestions to promote both effective and just cybercrime policing.